A. F. Moritz's new poems follow from the poet's moment of reckoning, the vision of emptiness and discontinuity which has left him seeking the barest form of renewal, what he calls in one poem "strange continuance." The work has a feeling of great urgency. These are meditative poems, but they exhibit all the balance and serenity of a car chase: the sentences zoom across lines and stanzas as if they were receiving fire from an Uzi. Reading the best poems, you feel as if the verse has been driven by the competing forces of precision and speed. Consider, for instance, the opening of "Memory of a Friend":

Through these same rusting girders these same stars
have risen, turned, returned ten thousand times
since I first followed you into this vast pit

of piled materials and shrouded engines,
walled off and locked, as dark was thickening.
Somewhere near here is where I fell behind,

or looked away, a moment only, lost you,
and you went on oblivious, or saw
and quickly slipped between unfinished walls

Like those "unfinished walls," the passage has a beguiling incompleteness. The poem, after all, stems from the unsatisfied emotion between the speaker and his lost friend. The scene itself, that industrial agglomeration, seems just barely held together. And yet Moritz matches this sense of near desperation with his careful technique: the deftly handled pentameter tautens the rush of the syntax, while the concrete images work to ground the ethereal tone. The tension between dissolution and cohesion reflects both the poet's emotional state and his perception of our age. And this conflict creates the dramatic life of all the best poems in the book.

Like many poets, Moritz is a poor editor of his own work. Night Street Repairs would be a much stronger collection if the second half were simply razored out. These later sections reveal Moritz's big weakness: windiness. Without that adhesive pull of lucid imagery or meter, the lines tend to gust on and on. A poem like "If Timotheus Come" or "Singer and Prisoner" makes me think of a giant, creaking bellows. But even based on the first fifty-one pages of Night Street Repairs, Moritz appears as a vital poet. He has that priceless combination of emotional strength and formal attentiveness, a combination which can seem particularly rare these days when the editors of prominent houses so often deal in reputations instead of real artwork. Moritz is easily a better poet than the last four winners of the Pulitzer Prize. With a little judicious winnowing, a good editor could give him a volume of selected poems he deserves. That would be a superb book.

— Peter Campion