In his tenth book of poetry, Crusz attempts to track and document his faltering human journey towards God and the Divine. Eschewing profound theological and philosophical abstractions, he keeps his story squarely within its human context, but not without shades of Bhakti philosophy in the personal love of God and the mischief and frailty of the human lover . . . His story is the Augustinian Confesssions retold with variations. As always, the work bears ample evidence of Crusz's unerring gift for language and brilliant image.

Rienzi Crusz's profile page

Rienzi Crusz was born in Sri Lanka and came to Canada in 1965. He was educated at the Universities of Ceylon, London (England), Toronto, and Waterloo. He is the author of eleven books of verse and has been widely published in periodicals and anthologies in Canada and the United States.

"I can't think of a single Canadian poet who, groin-tickled and happy, could achieve
such delirium on paper. The raw passion is there despite the control the poems insist on."
- IRVING LAYTON

"Arguably the best living Sri Lankan poet in English ..., Crusz belongs to the older postcolonial generation, including such writers as Walcott and Soyinka, prepared to appropriate the colonial legacy of Shakespeare and English..."
- World Literature Today

"A moving and provocative portrayal. The historical and imaginative work wonderfully together. Through the many voices of history and the imagination, Crusz's dramatic tale unfolds in all its lyrical power, bringing together the postmodern and the postcolonial in exciting new ways."
- LINDA HUTCHEON

"This is a concentration of “that fine madness' which Michael Drayton thought “should possess a poet's brain.' The fine madness that has gripped Crusz's mind is none other than his inseparable first love, his creator , whose strange music we hear in this album of autobiographical poems."
- ALOYSIUS PIERIS, S.J.

"Both an affirmation of life and a meditation on death, the collection embodies and enacts poetry as prayer, as hymn, as benediction.
He has much in common with such poets as W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke and Irving Layton, embracing both the profane and the spiritual, the sexual and the sacred. Like William Blake, he recognizes that Everything that lives is Holy. Gambolling with the Divine contains the doubts, thoughts and feelings of a poet at the height of his powers as he approaches death's harvest of white bones.
As such, it's a love letter to the examined life, gracefully and eloquently confirming that Faith trumps the wounded soul."
— The Record

PRAISE FOR RIENZI CRUSZ'S POETRY:

If you want to share a sensibility which is at once primitive and sophisticated, both intense and subtle, a poetic craft which is taut and concentrated, then read Flesh and Thorn. “Quarry

Can Lit...has never articulated and transcended the experience of the incomer so wonderfully ...the voice rings with a timbre known at once and altogether distinct; its range is abnormally large; its tone of infinite variety.
?The New Quarterly

The cultural gift Crusz offers us, as a kind of magnificent verbal embroidery of the plain cloth of Canadian speech, continually surprises, delights, mystifies and liberates those of us raised on the sound of what Northrop Fry has called "the Canadian goose honk."
?The Toronto South Asian Review

His "Immigrant's Song" is not only an attempt to come to terms with his own past, it is also a heroic statement of poetic independence.
?ARUN MUKHERJEE, Currents

Crusz, the most delicately nuanced (of such voices) uses his to balance a history, a role, and a difficult displacement... Like the West Indian poet, Derek Walcott [he] will not indulge in simplified opposition, whether of language, culture or colour. “Ariel

Crusz's language is subtle and he makes his points obliquely. Moreover, his self-examination always includes the social context of an immigrant's struggle for a sense of identity. “Books in Canada

The Sun-Man poems are major artifacts of a new Canadian sensibility, important for the realities of our national selfhood.
?NANCY LOU PATTERSON, University of Waterloo

Here was a true poetry of the displaced self, with sorrow beneath its bemused surface. Opposites-elephant and ice- are reconciled by a delightful wit, and ferocious though may be his interior heat, the light that the Sun -Man sheds upon the world lingers in the mind with a lovely after-glow.
?ZULFIKAR GHOSE, University of Texas

To call Crusz an immigrant poet is to summarize his intents too glibly. In both his books it is not the obvious contrast between elephant and ice, Sri Lanka and Canada, that is central but rather the manifold and specific ways in which a certain sensibility tries to cope honestly with perennial themes in both cultures.
?RESHARD GOOL

A most articulate poetry, with a fascinating sense of where you come from and where to.
?ROBERT CREELY

His real genius lies not in the message contained in the poetry, but in the pursuit of perfection in poetic form. Very much a poet of sound and rhythm, Crusz writes with an awareness that poetry is about language, about the power of imagination. He is a very self -conscious poet, and that is precisely why his reputation will outlast that of his contemporaries.
?CHELVA KANAGANAYAKAM, University of Toronto