Asleep in the Garden
The raw beauty and ugliness of stones, of an animal’s snout; the horror of the Holocaust as experienced by one’s ancestors; the dumb wonder of daily being—these are some of the strands in Stanley Moss’s marvelous new collection of poems, made out of ‘certain words / he hoped might not be his face, / words he misspelled / in languages he barely knew, but every letter / was hair and tooth.’ Beyond private recollections the vast uneasy matter of the inevitability (or not) of being always looms: ‘While in the great head / what is happening and what happen mingle, for neither has to be.’ Unthinkable questions, perhaps, but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight. This is Stanley Moss’s finest book so far: an impressive achievement.
—John Ashbery
From PN Review
Stanley Moss, born in 1925, is a complex Jewish poet from a cosmopolitan, New York, suburban background. His poetry shows a development in a lifelong quest, which is derivative of biblical themes, but by no means overshadowed by them; his sources reach beyond these, drawing on zoology, paleontology, and anthropology, for example. The result, after an absorbing and entertaining journey, is a triumphant consummation in old age. He achieves an almost prophetic sense of vocation. It is typical of his Jewishness that this is kept in check by his professional life as a dealer in oil paintings; and the editorship of The Sheep Meadow Press.
His collection reflects and advances on his three previous collections, made at 44, 50, and 64, all published by Anvil. Jerusalem, Psalm, Noah, Prayer, God Poem, leap from the list of contents. This is not to suggest we place the book to one side; rather the contrary. After an opening rocky ride, we settle down with an engaging personality. He has a quirky attitude to Judaism, which constantly wrong-foots any sense of predictability:
He wrote scripture on the inner surface of a bowl,poured water in, stirred until the writing was dissolved,
then filled his mouth, gargled, swallowed, and grinned.
(‘The First Days of March’)
This sense of digestive commitment is not a coincidence. It is a reference to Ezekiel 3:1. God says to Ezekiel: ‘Son of man, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.’
We are not in the company of a flibbertigibbet. ‘Only the man-bird flies from the Dead Sea to the Himalayas, / I from the ancient dead shrouded in poetry / to the never-ending ice.’ (‘Fool’). The bird-man is a figure well-known to anthropology: the shaman or intercessor between 20:20 and visionary vision, between the exigencies of life and the exigencies of death. ‘I make noise for the Lord,” says Moss. (‘Psalm’). The question is, Does he make poetry?
Yes; and rarely divorced from the prophetic element in this. He knows ‘the world’s brightening never reaches / the darkness of being’ (‘Black Dog’); but protests: ‘My candelabrum is blaze’(’The Altar’); ‘But how shall we call gossip prophecy?’(’The Lace Makers’). His struggle is all the more impressive, because of his willingness to take on the big issues. Poverty, for instance:
The poor of Venice know the gold mosaicof hunger, the grand architecture of lice,
that poverty is a heavier brocade
than any doge would shoulder. To the winter galas
the poor still wear the red silk gloves of frostbite,
the flowing cape of chilblain.
(‘The Poor of Venice’)
He shows a similar oblique approach to the Shoah. ‘Only the nightmare is legal tender’ (‘The Debt’). But he also says: ‘I’ve heard music so beautiful /it seemed the blood of the Lord.’ (‘Song of Imaginary Arabs’). So what is going on in this extraordinary man? ‘I know the great stonemakers can show the wind in marble, / ecstasy, blood, a button left undone’ (‘Work Song’). Facing death, he chips his own stone:
Aging, I am a stowaway in the hold of my being.Even memory is a finger to my lips.
Once I entered down the center aisle
at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus
on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me.
‘Who is this master of her ninety nipples?’
the public whispered.
Now the ocean is my audience...
(‘Stowaway’)
Henry Adams would have approved. Moss concludes with this characteristic flourish: ‘Give me a death like Buddha’s. Let me fall / over from eating mushrooms Provençal, / a peasant wine pouring down my shirtfront’ (‘Prayer’).
—Sebastian Barker
From Poetry
Stanley Moss’s wrestlings with the angels—God’s and otherwise—are the sophisticated prayers of an agnostic. The voice of Asleep in the Garden, which selects from Moss’s three books and threads in new work, is for the most part a consistent one, and the poet to whom we attach it does not emerge as a particularly likeable character: wry, suspicious of human nature, not always ingenuous in his actions. He lingers in Europe and the Holy Land, trying to catch a glimpse of death, or the dead. He sees art and poetry as perhaps closer to God than everyday sights and talk, but doubts both their transportive power and God’s existence. He is sometimes hopeful, sometimes bitter, and sometimes doesn’t seem to feel much at all. But he is aware of his failings, and can take combative pleasure in them: “In a garden under grape leaves, / he rested his head on books and wrote a bad comedy / about the seasons passing more quickly / and the worship and praise his god had disregarded. / He wrote scripture on the inner surface of a bowl, / poured water in, stirred until the writing was dissolved, / then filled his mouth, gargled, swallowed, and grinned.” Sometimes such toyings with blasphemy (“What if the Virgin Mother miscarried?” asks another) come off as more glib than funny, but others get to the heart of Moss’s project. For a visit to a Lithuanian ghetto and nearby death camp, the poet can mockingly “put on my Mosaic horns, a pointed beard, / my goat-hoof feet” and ask “Who planted the lilac and chestnut trees? / Whose woods are these? I think I know.” His missives from sites of horror and spiritual unrest never quite name what’s driving them, and continue to circle restlessly as the poet struggles to get as close as he can to his mishigas. Poems like “Song of Imperfection,” which ends with the lines “There is not a thing on earth without a star / that beats upon it and tells it to grow,” or “Apocrypha” (“Sacred and defiled, / my soul is right / to deal with me in secret”) come very near. Yet in invoking Paul Celan by writing in his son’s voice in “Mon Père,” Moss succeeds only in reminding us of the impossible demands his subject matter makes on the Jacobs of our time. In many of the poems here, however, Moss finds ways to let provisionality stand in for redemption: “There’s hope! My eyes look into the top of my head / at the wreath of snakes that sometimes crowns me.”
—Michael Scharf
From Booklist
Moss is oceanic: his poems rise, crest, crash, and rise again like waves. Moss is avian: the “I” of his poems glides above the earth, high enough to see its curve and to gaze down on us as we, worshipful and violent, build and destroy. Moss’ voice echoes the boom of the Old Testament, the fluty trill of Greek mythology, and the gongs of Chinese rituals as he writes about love, nature, war, oppression, and the miracle of language. He addresses the God of the Jews, of the Christians, and of the Moslems with awe and familiarity, and chants to lesser gods of his own invention, such as the “God of paper and writing,” with jocosity and gratitude. All forms of being grab his ardent attention; he writes a letter to butterflies, and tells the stories of bears, birds, dogs, and centaurs. In every surprising poem, every song to life, beautiful life, Moss, by turns giddy and sorrowful, expresses a sacred sensuality and an earthy holiness.
—Donna Seaman
From The American Poetry Review
Stanley Moss published Asleep in the Garden: New and Selected Poems in 1998. Like Stryk, he divided the book into sections and did not arrange the poems specifically by previous book titles. The titles of his previous books however—The Intelligence of Clouds, The Wrong Angel, The Skull of Adam—convey the texture and focus of his poetic project. On his jacket blurb for this book, Hayden Carruth comments, “The poetry of the ages is an argument with God, so it is said; but not many poets attempt it today. Stanley Moss does.” The strength of Moss’s poems lies in the fact that he can continue the argument and keep it immediate to our lives, where we are at the end of all this time in relation to God, myth, skepticism, the unrevisable facts of death on an individual and large scale. He continues to work the hypothesis about a common fate on earth with tenderness and attention to the lives of others as well as his own. He has a clear and direct voice, a voice resonant with Old Testament rhetoric and rich with imagery from the traditions of the world—Chinese, Mayan, Greek, and Persian allusion as well as Judeo-Christian tradition.
His mission is to rescue what he can of the lives he knows. Moss sees the ironies and injustices of life full well and often falls out on the secular side of his argument with the usual lines of belief. He prefaces his collection with a quote from Baudelaire: “God is the sole being who has no need to exist in order to reign.” Moss’s poems address the possible folly and apparent impossibility of our desire to explain ourselves, our lives, beyond our basic chemicals. The overall inference of course, in a very traditional reading, is that it is the poet and by extension all of us who are “asleep in the garden”—that mythopoetic garden that is the earth. The subtext, the emotional undercurrent, however, suggests that it might be God, in his distance and indifference, who is also asleep there. The difficulties and inconsistencies are what Moss tries to work out and salvage through poetry, through prayer.
PSALMGod of paper and writing, God of first and last drafts,
God of dislikes, God of everyday occasions—
He is not my servant, does not work for tips.
Under the dome of the Roman Pantheon
God in three persons carries a cross on his back
as an aging Centaur, hands bound behind his back, carries Eros.
Chinese God of examinations: bloodwork, biopsy,
urine analysis, grant me the grade of fair
in the study of dark holes,
fair in anus, self-knowledge, and the leaves of the vagina
like the pages of a book in the vision of Ezekiel.
May I also open my mouth and read the book by eating it,
swallow its meaning. My shepherd, let me continue to just pass
in the army of the living,
keep me from the ranks of the excellent dead.
It’s true I worshipped Aphrodite
who has driven me off with her slipper
after my worst ways pleased her. I make noise for the Lord.
My Shepherd, I want, I want, I want.
I’ve quoted the poem here to show the complexity of Moss’ vision. The spiritual nature of our desire is to live, to go on living. The poet finds it in poetry, singing, prayer; all ages and all cultures have found art and God as the end, a force for life. And yet, Moss tells us here, it may all be desire, it may all be only singing.
There are almost as many references to classical Greek culture in these poems as there are references to Jerusalem and the problems of peaceful co-existence between the Jews and Arabs and the Christians. Nevertheless, in all cases, the allusions and settings seem genuine, never imposed or stiff, the honest and natural product of the poetic mind attempting to unpuzzle the facts. In “The Lesson of the Birds” Moss begins with “The Birds of Aristophanes” but then quickly moves back into early cosmological speculation. His view of God/gods here is anything but orthodox. Here is the second/last stanza of the poem.
Time weathered such things,had a secret heavy underwing;
an urge toward a warm continuum,
its odor of nests made a kind of light.
Before there was pine, oak, or mud, seasons revolved,
a whirlwind abducted darkness, gave birth,
gave light to an egg. Out of the egg of darkness
sprang love the entrancing, the brilliant.
Love hatched us commingling, raised us
as the firstlings of love. There was never
a race of Gods at all until love
had stirred the universe into being.
The voice here has the authority of a creation story, it has the compression and rhythms and essential imagery that for the moment of the poem allow us to consider this interpretation. In “Song of Introduction” Moss addresses the very immediate conflict of the Arabs and Jews and at the same time employs, to musical and textural effect, the detail and imagery from the Old Testament. Here is most of the poem.
Ancient of Days,I hear the sound and silence…
I believe poetry
like kindness changes the world, a little.
It reaches the ear of lion and lamb, it enters
the nest of birds, the course of fish, it is water
in the cupped hands of Arab and Jew....
If ever in writing I become a stone,
I will not stone the innocent or guilty,
my Arabs and Jews will do what my imagination wishes: make peace....
I believe something is thundering
in the mold, churning the hives of insects,
that the breath of every living creature mixes
in a summer cloud, that the killer’s breath may taste of honey,
that when the forms of music change,
the state may tremble.
Yet for all the tradition (this is not his only poem which begins with the old Hebrew name for God, “Ancient of Days”) for the symbolic level of the imagery, Moss is also a realist. He knows what chance poetry has, what chance prayer has, at bringing peace given the silence of God.
In a similar vein, one of the most powerful and highly lyric poems in the collection is “Jerusalem, Easter” dedicated to Yehuda and Hana Amichai. A longer poem in four parts, the first two offer a fine, distilled litany of flower images and Old Testament references to proclaim life, and as always, Moss tempers the lyric impulse with irony and realism:
“Christ performed two miracles: first he rose, / and then he convinced many that he rose.” Section three especially counterpoints the loveliness of the first two sections with sober speculations and introspection:
On this bright Easter morningsmelling of-Arab bread,
what if God simply changed his mind
and called out into the city,
“Thou shalt not kill,” and, like an angry father,
“I will not say it another time!”
They are praying too much in Jerusalem,
reading and praying beside street fires,
too much holy bread, leavened and unleavened,
the children kick a ball of fire.
I don’t know what’s happening,
it’s as if I were in a battle.
I catch myself almost praying,
for the first time in my life,
to a God I treat like a nettle
on my trouser cuff.
Moss succeeds in this and other poems by his candor and contradictions which give credibility and sincerity to his voice and vision. The prayer/psalm like quality of this and other poems is obvious. Yet it is Moss’s ability to allow himself to pray for the first time in his life, to desire comfort and mercy in and from belief as he does in the first lines of section three here, implicitly believing that “god” is somewhere running the show and
making decisions, and then to catch himself slipping into that unearned belief that makes for the poignancy and authority of the poem. Moss says there is too much praying, too much waiting and inaction, and then finds himself praying and considering the idea of God in spite of a lifetime of comparative agnosticism. These are some of the true contradictions in the heart and mind, and here Moss is finding an accurate and exalted poetry for them.
—Christopher Buckley
From The Jerusalem Post
Stanley Moss is another American poet noted for a fluid, free verse and a personal and largely unaffected voice. Unlike Stern, however, Moss takes risks, rising above personal experience and observation to dare such topics as Hannibal crossing the Alps, the voyage of Noah’s Ark, the fate of the Jews of Kaunas, and what God might have had in mind as such events took place. Often as not, these risks pay off handsomely.
Moss is well connected to this country, for the Sheep Meadow Press, which Moss heads, has published books by such noted Israelis as Yehuda Amichai, Yona Wallach, Aharon Shabtai, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Shirley Kaufman, Linda Zisquit and Peter Cole. Returning the compliment, Israel features prominently in Moss’s latest collection, Asleep in the Garden (Seven Stories Press, 160 pp., $20). The Israel-inspired poems are indeed fine. (The one about contracting lice from a skullcap at the Kotel is quite amazing.) But it must be admitted that many of the poems given genesis by visits to Italy, China and elsewhere are equally enchanting.
Outstanding, too, are the heartfelt poems memorializing such figures as Robert Lowell, James Wright and—surprise——Zero Mostel. Occasionally Moss overshoots into goofy posturing (“I fly the flag of the menstruating black dog...”). But he’s nothing if not down to earth in such poems as “Vomit” and “Saint Merde.”
Regardless of genre or subject matter, Moss is capable of imagery and ideas that rank with the best. “The Lost Daughter,” for example, begins: “I have protected the flame of a match / I lit and then discarded / More than I cared for you....” That poem continues for 18 additional short lines, but threatens to haunt the reader forever. Had American poetry a front rank these days, Stanley Moss would be a member.
—Matt Nesvisky
From Library Journal
A poet of thoughtful melancholy and modest praises, of spiritual questioning and self- interrogation, Moss... writes poems that struggle to make sense of both the world’s beauty and its pain (“I don’t know how to speak / for the poor of the world so hungry / God only appears to them as bread”). Frequent classical and biblical allusions reinforce the gravity of Moss’s themes over the three decades of work included here—such as the position of modern humanity vis-à-vis ancient traditions, the individual’s responsibility to collective well-being, and the personal significance of Judaic history—yet he never seems overbearing or self-consciously academic. Still, the poet’s sincerity and endearing wit (as in “Letter to Noah”), are nevertheless undermined by a certain monotony of rhythm and over-reliance on prepositions, which tend to enervate the poems, producing a world- weary tone, a flatness (“When Verdi came to his hotel in Milan / the city put straw on the street / below his window”) that saps the vigor of his metaphysical probings. For larger poetry collections.
—Fred Muratori
From Publishers Weekly
“In writing, he moved from the word I, the word once a serpent curled between the rocks, / to he, the word once a hawk drifting above the reeds, / back to us: a nest of serpents.” Carving out a complex identity, as a writer, Jew, mortal and fault-ridden, struggling David, Moss’s best work has always drawn on his gifts as an anguished psalmist. Many of the 25 or so new poems in this new and selected fourth collection try to find an everyday language for less-than-divine forms of knowing: “I speak of prayer, it is not prayer. / I count syllables like minutes before sunset... / Old enough, I have learned to be my own child: I carry myself on my shoulders, whipping and laughing.” In “Lost Daughter,” another new poem, Moss wrestles grimly with himself as well as with his God: “I have protected the flame of a match / I lit and then discarded more than I cared for you.” Studded with classical allusions and acerbic historical musings (“The park benches, of course, are ex-Nazis / They supported the ass of the SS” Moss writes of Munich). This collection reveals a poet who must inhabit what he learns—often painfully—about love and faith, and who refuses to let us, or himself, off the hook. FYI: Moss is the publisher and editor of the nonprofit Sheep Meadow Press.
From H&H Series
Readers are well aware of American Jewish novelists such as Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Bernard Malamud but frequently ignorant of American poets who have, on occasions, grappled with Jewish themes and, as Jews, responded to our 20th century assaulting catastrophes.
Stanley Moss is one such. In “Exchange of Gifts” he charmingly investigates his Jewish heritage, even Jewish cooking. In Jerusalem he reflects on the head louse that he picked up from a skull cap when confronting the Western Wall. In Lithuania, keenly aware of his forbears, he visits a forest where so many Jews were murdered. “I am the only dirty word in the Lithuanian language,” Moss bitterly cries. In the public gardens of Munich he notes how ‘Juden Verboten’ has been painted out on the park benches. Of course not all Stanley Moss’ poems in this generous selection touch on Jewish manners, but all reveal a complicated and genuine poet at work. Part One of his selection, in particular, is dazzlingly effective.
From Books & Co Newsletter
Nor does Stanley Moss nod, though his moving collection of new and selected poems is entitled, Asleep in the Garden (Seven Stories, $20.OO)—a title which richly suggests in its manifold allusions to, among other things, the sleep of Adam during which Eve came into being, the disciples’ lapse at Gethsemane, the scene of old Hamlet’s poisoning, the collection’s expansive multi-faceted consideration of flesh’s appetites and the imagination’s possibilities, of humanity’s cruelties and nature’s wonders, of literature’s traditions—secular and sacred—and its possibilities.