From the outskirts of the fevered empire, and the embers that were its heart, Moritz sings us to our selves ? our failures, our cruelties, our stupidities, and beauty which even now astonishes and leaves us breathless. Genuine political poetry is immensely difficult. Moritz succeeds, not because his list of atrocities is longer or more shocking, but because his vision is underwritten-not whitewashed-by an ecstatic lyricism that knows evanescence is the only enduring truth.