Winner, 2025 Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize
“You don’t live if there’s no poetry: you don’t live
at all, or if you appear to yourself to be living, you’re not.
You really are living, though, even if you’re dead,
because you do have poetry, poetry’s with you
whether or not you know it…”
Great Silent Ballad, beloved lyric poet A.F. Moritz’s twenty-second volume of poetry, in visionary terms forwards the assertion that poetry, a primordial reality, is in the current moment both the equal of, and the antidote to, the rest of present-day civilization and its suicidal nature.
The book unfolds in seven short sections that probe such topics as the crucial value of childhood; a human person’s development through maturity and age; the perennially avant-garde nature of great poetry no matter what time and place; and poetry’s inherent involvement with hope and creativity, life and feeling, freedom and love. Great Silent Ballad also reprises Moritz’s longstanding celebration of common human conversation, the apex of which (he argues convincingly) is what we call “poetry”—meaning not just the art of verse, but our total access to the goodness of natural existence.
Winner, 2025 Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize
“You don’t live if there’s no poetry: you don’t live
at all, or if you appear to yourself to be living, you’re not.
You really are living, though, even if you’re dead,
because you do have poetry, poetry’s with you
whether or not you know it…”
Great Silent Ballad, beloved lyric poet A.F. Moritz’s twenty-second volume of poetry, in visionary terms forwards the assertion that poetry, a primordial reality, is in the current moment both the equal of, and the antidote to, the rest of present-day civilization and its suicidal nature.
The book unfolds in seven short sections that probe such topics as the crucial value of childhood; a human person’s development through maturity and age; the perennially avant-garde nature of great poetry no matter what time and place; and poetry’s inherent involvement with hope and creativity, life and feeling, freedom and love. Great Silent Ballad also reprises Moritz’s longstanding celebration of common human conversation, the apex of which (he argues convincingly) is what we call “poetry”—meaning not just the art of verse, but our total access to the goodness of natural existence.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Sep 24, 2024 |
| Specifications | 144 pages | 5.5 in x 8.5 in |
| Keywords | visionary; contemporary; avant-garde; Summer Snow; Robert Hass; Michael Crummey; Passengers; Lurch; Don McKay; Barbara Carey; |
|
Supporting Resources
(select item to download) |
Excerpt |
| Written By |
A.F. MORITZ’s most recent books from House of Anansi Press are Great Silent Ballad (2024), As Far as You Know (2020) and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018). Three of his books have been finalists for the Governor General’s Award; The Sentinel won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His work overall has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and other recognitions. A.F. Moritz was Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2019 to 2023. |
| Written By |
|
A.F. MORITZ’s most recent books from House of Anansi Press are Great Silent Ballad (2024), As Far as You Know (2020) and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018). Three of his books have been finalists for the Governor General’s Award; The Sentinel won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His work overall has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and other recognitions. A.F. Moritz was Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2019 to 2023. |
Winner, Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize, 2025
“Great Silent Ballad is a poet’s poetry book in one respect, but also quite mesmerizing in its visionary scenes … The poet’s voice engages the reader within its humanism as the speaker delves into his vulnerable childhood and a self-avowedly meagre experience outside of imaginative truth.” — The Fiddlehead
” —“Great Silent Ballad offers us a refreshing and uplifting vision in the face of violence, social injustice, and inevitable physical extinction, and some of the poems in it are among the finest Moritz has written in his long and distinguished career.” — The High Window
” —“Great Silent Ballad is a masterful continuation of Moritz’s oeuvre, as well as a reminder that the lyric, at its best, still holds the power to transform attention into ethical insight.” — The Seaboard Review
” —