Review
Much of the poetry in Crown and Ribs goes far beyond sonnet length. Blaise Moritz writes longer poems without wavering or losing track of his path, an explorer always knowing where he is going. His style is deeply grounded in literary tradition while also sounding contemporary. For a first book of poetry, Crown and Ribs contains many exceptional poems. With considerable skill and a distinct awareness of the universal essence hiding in everyday things.
-- The Toronto Globe & Mail
"'The hours ahead are already waning, devastated/by my want of a design for them,' notes Blaise Moritz in Wasting, as if fitted-out with an extra faculty of vision and understanding. This is a large-hearted collection, committed to an ethical singing of the paradox of lives still stitched into economy; and, too often, subordinated to it. These poems have won my trust, having journeyed into the modern city and marked out, in confident, lucid, weighted verse 'some pleasure in my fatigue/some peace in the dark and late.' Crown and Ribs reminds us how deeply we might yet live our unsold hours."
-- Ken Babstock
Product Description
In
Crown and Ribs, Blaise Moritz's debut collection, the poet wanders the urban landscape singing hymns to work and creation.
Proletarian heroes like Nova Scotian miner William Davis and oral historian Studs Terkel become characters on his journey through the urban, industrial and commercial landscape - a place where trees grow through fences distorting the property line and the reader's senses. The role of work and worker are the most significant subjects to a poet "haunted by waste," alongside a yearning for what is lost.
His language is of the classical and the perishable; his twining, accomplished lines combine lucid detail and sheer, bold elegance, arriving at unexpected truths.
