Great Silent Ballad: Poems

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, ...