"Open Almost Complete Poems anywhere, and you will come shockingly upon wisdom and beauty, a diversity of styles—a unity of voice, a voice that was there since the beginning. I love Stanley Moss's work. The pace, the strategy, the wit, the knowledge are astonishing. I want to add that of the generation that is gradually leaving us, those born in the mid and late 1920s, Bly, Levine, Kinnell, Rich, Kumen, O’Hara, Cooper, Ferry, Ashbery, Merwin, Gilbert, Wright, myself, he has a prominent place. He loves donkeys. He owns Ted Roethke’s raccoon coat. He is an original.”   —GERALD STERN

“Again and again, coming upon a poem of Stanley Moss’s, I have had the feeling of being taken by surprise. Not simply by the eloquence or the direct authenticity of the language, for I had come to expect those in his poems. The surprise arose from the nature of his poetry itself, and from the mystery that his poems confront and embody, which makes them both intense and memorable . . . I've loved Stanley's poems since I first encountered a poem of his in Poetry magazine in John Berryman's office when I was nineteen. . . . ” —W.S. MERWIN

“Magisterial… Almost Complete Poems is magnificent. I’ve read it several times with greater and greater pleasure. Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanity, the quality and quantity of information which it integrates into poetry of the highest order make it a continuing delight.” —MARILYN HACKER

"I love It's About Time. I haven’t read a book of poems straight through with such pleasure and wonder in ages. You may quote me! I urged the book on a roomful of poetry readers just yesterday." —DON SHARE, editor of Poetry

“Moss may or may not be accurately termed a religious poet: if he’s a religious poet, he’s one of the too-few irreligious kind, firmly of this world in his vivid pleasures and sorrows, joyfully harrying God from myth to unsatisfactory myth, denomination to denomination, fascinated by the whole subject of deity, but hardly expecting a catch or kill. He views the gods of the monotheist religions, as this poem will make clear, with some cynicism, at least towards their exegetes. Although he quotes Auden with approval that 'all poets, as such / are polytheists,' even that degree of mysticism is one that his poetry subverts." —CAROL RUMENS (click here to read the full piece in The Guardian)

“Stanley Moss is American poetry's best-kept secret, better known as the innovative publisher of other poets than for his own highly charged, stingingly beautiful lyrics. That should change with the publication of his long-awaited and gorgeous New and Selected Poems. . . . 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

“It is time to celebrate the singular beauty and power of Stanley Moss’s poetry. He is a citizen of the world, both past and present, one who seems to have been everywhere and missed nothing. These are poems, out of the fullness of life, that impresses me as being all at once deep, strange, loving, bountiful, and a joy to read . . . The damp genius of mortality presides.” —STANLEY KUNITZ

“These are poems made of experience and high intellect. From the first measured trope to the last haunting moment, in which God equals a question, these poems curse and sing about the blessings and tragedies of personal life. Embracing the larger world, they’re also hardy psalms that make me say, Thanks for this important, gutsy collection.” —YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

“Obsessively I wish Yahweh would just go away, because I don’t like him or trust him, but he won’t go. Stanley Moss has his own mode for confronting this dilemma, and he handles it eloquently.” —HAROLD BLOOM

“The poetry of the ages is an argument with God, so it is said; but not many poets attempt it today. Stanley Moss does. In many voices, in lines rugged yet eloquent, in different places and with various learnings, he sings us songs of his unbelievable belief, his unlovable love songs of anguish, songs any of us would sing if we could. I find them disconcerting and extraordinarily moving.” —HAYDEN CARRUTH

“Over the past decade Stanley Moss has tapped into a well of feeling and a wealth of metaphor and memory that have made him one of the most moving and eloquent American poets. His rueful yet celebratory poems on the illness and death of friends are remarkable examples of this late-life creative surge. They are poems to read and reread, poems to cherish as they cherish their subjects.” —MORRIS DICKSTEIN

“It is time to celebrate the singular beauty and power of Stanley Moss’s poetry. He is a citizen of the world, both past and present, one who seems to have been everywhere and missed nothing. These are poems, out of the fullness of life, that impress me as being all at once deep, strange, loving, bountiful, and a joy to read . . . . The damp genius of mortality presides.” 
—STANLEY KUNITZ

“There are many great strengths in this book (The Intelligence of Clouds): a speaking voice assured in its rhythms, a language both exalted and plain, a mind that can think to the point of revelation within its elected figures or images. But such poems as ‘The Debt’ and ‘For Margaret’ are not to be described in terms of mere virtuosity. Their power comes of the fact that they are genuine—that they arise, as Yeats said poems must, ‘from the poet’s deep and honest quarrel with himself.’” —RICHARD WILBUR

“Over the past decade Stanley Moss has tapped into a well of feeling and a wealth of metaphor and memory that have made him one of the most moving and eloquent American poets. His rueful yet celebratory poems on the illness and death of friends are remarkable examples of his late-life creative surge. They are poems to read and reread, poems to cherish as they cherish their subjects.”  —MORRIS DICKSTEIN

“As grand in his generosity as he is in his appetites . . . the larger-than-life persona Moss has created and sustained is good to have in your head, and at your side. God may or may not be his co-pilot, but Moss has a knack for lifting my spirits into ‘the sweaty / life-loving, Book-loving air of happiness.’” —ERIC MURPHY SELINGER, Parnassus

“To reassert a Rimbaldian alchimie du verbe is one thing, to deliver the promise of its ‘hidden miracles’ is another, but Moss knows where to search. His work ranges from Beijing to New York, ancient Greece to modern Italy, from the Jerusalem of the Arabs to the Jerusalem of the Jews. Each site has its rich, troubled langauge, resources for Moss, who finds America in a swarm of butterflies and God in a bath-tub. This is not to say anything goes; the poet’s own baroque language is intricate and resolutely historical. When the ‘hidden miracle’ is unearthed, it emerges as a tentative credo: ‘I believe poetry, / like kindness changes the world, a little.’”  —LAWRENCE NORFOLK, Times Literary Supplement

“Here is a mind operating in open air, unimpeded by fashion or forced thematic focus, profoundly catholic in perspective, at once accessible and erudite, inevitably compelling. All of which is to recommend Moss’s ability to participate in and control thoroughly these poems while resisting the impulse to center himself in them. This differentiates his beautiful work from much contemporary breast-beating. Moss is an artist who embraces the possibilities of exultation, appreciation, reconciliation, of extreme tenderness. As such he lays down a commitment to a common, worldly morality toward which all beings gravitate.”   —G. E. MURRAY, American Book Review

“These phrases pass through my mind: The sadness of biblical loss; the prophet in Gaza without his God; the melancholy of the modern finding its beauty in loss itself. I realize that Moss has struck upon the one theme that preoccupies us all and fills our days: we are adrift between two shores. We no longer have the assurance of a spirit world and we do not have the confidence in ourselves to go it alone. In this book, Moss captures the theme in poem after poem with poignancy and keeps me reading to the last page, and then to reread them all for their sweet melancholy which is their beauty and so much a pleasure to experience. It is a paradox that only a master of his art can command.”  —DAVID IGNATOW

“Moss is oceanic: his poems rise, crest, crash, and rise again like waves. His 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. . . . 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, Booklist