The Wren

by A.F. Moritz

A.F. Moritz’s twenty-third book of poems originated with an impulse, beginning in April 2019, to write a series of continuous poems. The first goal was to keep them short. The second was to make them separate, in the process reflecting the whole of human life, stable in moments and bodies. In The Wren, Moritz arranges 70 short poems in a sort of an apparent scatter, not of stars but of poems, of feeling-thoughts. What is the unity of these active “states” of ours, given that they do not simply follow, or hook onto, or neighbour, or echo one another in a chain of resemblance that seems to have gaps and missing links that reappear later, healed? The title was chosen partly to speak to Moritz’s The Selected Poems (2018), but also because, among the many short poems of this collection, one of them asked to be a poem about a small bird that hops from within a thicket of stems to peer out at the poet for a second and then disappears back inside. This tiny story of a tiny fellow creature is the narrative, the “novel,” of this a little story that is nonetheless one of the great and ever-retold stories.

90 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 7, 2026

About the author

A.F. Moritz has published more than twenty collections of poetry as well as important works of literary history and numerous translations of Latin American verse. A leading figure in the literary life of Canada, he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a major award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Two of his most recent works have reaffirmed his reputation: Night Street Repairs (2004) received the ReLit Award and The Sentinel (2008) won both the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Toronto.

Reviews

[Danielle]

Why do I talk to you so late

except that in the darkness words

are drawn out

of the mud: speech — which was created

by there being you

to talk with. And as then, as at first, the words

are still taking form — still are

given and take a form, so that one more thing

can appear on earth, another

flower, even so late.