Night Street Repairs

Book excerpt: Night Street Repairs contains elegiac meditations on time, modernity, and contemporary culture's unending flirtation with self-destruction. The many voices in these poems bear vigilant witness to humankind's urban wastes and wastefulness. Moritz's unmistakable cadences - magisterial, philosophical, and wry - mingle among the ancients, the Bible, Leopardi, Montale, and Rilke. These poems are mansions, at once derelict and opulent, inviting readers to wander with an open mind and hear through the poet's distinctive voice what the ages, humanity, and the myth of progress have wrought.