In Blaise Moritz's second collection, Zeppelin, we are passengers in the long-range ghost ship that is our new millennial culture. The time before technology recedes in our wake—the past an amazing clutter, if only as deep as early modern things—and looking forward, our impressions phase constantly. We travel far, seeing much that is strange, but it seems more enervating than thrilling, always subordinate to the constant narrative of crisis. In our weariness, we wish to reach apocalypse and post-apocalypse where we might recover some simplicity, but instead are left at loose ends, dwelling on all that has been lost, forgotten, defeated, none of which will even settle down into tragic symbols: at any time anything might be revived as nostalgia or as the improbable font of saving innovation.

And yet there is time and experience enough on our journey to arrive at the real once more, to rediscover the terrain, both natural and constructed, and know again that it preceded our maps. Time enough to return to the simplicity that is never lost within us, the redemptive powers of our childhood delight in what might still be a great gleaming ship built from our imaginations and the hope borne in the songs we sing en route.

Blaise Moritz lives in Toronto, Ontario. His poems have appeared widely in Canadian literary journals and he is the author of Crown and Ribs (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2007).
His website is blaisemoritz.com.

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