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From The Houston Chronicle

At any one time in any poetic culture there are only a handful of poets whose poems engage the highest questions of human life without losing the simplicity of daily life; whose argument is with God or gods as well as with themselves; whose language is both rich and colloquial, that is, whose voice can speak of eternal things as well as the small-change that makes up our daily lives.

One thinks of Auden, Roethke, Berryman, Amichai. It is in this distinguished company that Stanley Moss belongs. In five books he has worked the mine of his imagination with lapidary results. One could make a wonderful index of his openings:

What is heaven but the history of color…
My son carries my ghost on his shoulder, a falcon…
He lives in flight from an apartment desolate as Beethoven's jaw…

But an anthology of beginnings is just a taste of the richness of imagery, imagination and feeling contained in these poems. In the middle of “For James Wright” we find:

In your room without weather
Your wife brings you more days,
Sunlight and darkness, another summer,
Another winter, then spring rain.

This condensing of seasons into one hospital visit by a woman to her dying husband is typical of many of Moss’ quietly ambitious rhetorical moves. He concludes his poem about and to the dying poet James Wright with:

When Verdi came to his hotel in Milan
The city put straw on the street
below the window
so the sound of the carriages
wouldn't disturb him—If I could,
I'd bring you the love of America.
I kiss your hand and head, then I walk out on you,
past the fields of the sick and dying,
like a tourist in Monet’s garden.

Such poems put forth Moss’ unabashed lyric style but always with little surprises, like raisins in a cake, such as the dark “I walk out on you” and the bright “like a tourist in Monet's garden.”

In discussing Stanley Moss’ work I find it necessary to quote at length because his lines have an immediacy that beggars mere analysis. Also, because he has many modes. Example: in the title poem of this volume, “A History of Color,” we get the lines, angrily ironic but laden with wit:

Death, you tourist with too much luggage,
you can distinguish the living from your dead.
Can you tell Poseidon’s trident from a cake fork,
The living from the living, ...
Death, I think you take your greatest pleasure
In watching us murdering in great numbers
in ways even you have not planned.
They say in paradise every third thought is of earth
and a woman with a child at her breast.

Here the surprise comes in the form of an upside down invocation of Prospero’s last speech in The Tempest, “whose every third thought will be of death.” In Moss’ happier inversion, earth and a nursing mother replace death.

Of course, like all poets Moss engages death in endless colloquy. But he takes on the old antagonist in so many voices: lyric as in “the endless migration of the unjustly dead.” Or in the title poem in which he poses color as the victor over death.

He also celebrates language: in “Song of Alphabets” we read:

Hurrah for English, hidden miracles,
the A and E of waking and sleeping.
Thank you Sir, alone with your name,
for the erect L in love and open-legged V,
beautiful the Tree of Words in the forest
beside the tree of souls, lucky the bird
that held Alpha or Omega in its beak.

Much has been said of Moss’ engagement with the word and idea of God. In the epigraph to this book he quotes Baudelaire: “God is the sole being who has no need to exist in order to reign.” And indeed Moss’ God or gods are not the usual. In “The Altar” he writes:

To God I swore nothing.
In the blood and fires of without
Nothing was written, I heard the sermons of nothing
And I knew nothing had come and would come again,
And nothing was betrayed.
I called prayer
the practice of attention: nothing was
The balance of things contrary.
Disobedient, I did not make
The sacrifice of the lamb or the child.
My Candelabrum was ablaze.

The echoes and denial of Jesus (the lamb) and Isaac (the child) give the poem its bitter taste; yet the candelabrum is still ablaze. The repeated chant of “nothing” calls up tremors of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snowman,” with a touch of Lear.

In the complex landscape of contemporary poetry we often are asked to choose between profound engagement and satirical bite. It's a pleasure to read a poet who refuses to choose, who solders the one to the other, often in the same poem. Moss also offers learning—biblical, classical references and a deep understanding of painting.

Moss is in his 70s, but in a true sense he is in his prime. The poet Louis Simpson once said, “The most important thing about a poem is that it should be necessary.” In these selections from his five previous collections and one new one, we are offered a complete look at a poet who is, in the deepest sense, necessary.

—Daniel Stern

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From Poetry Flash

Stanley Moss is a rumbler, a big poet, sensual and erudite, whose poems feel liquid as a lava flow. Here’s the opening of his title poem, first in the book:

What is heaven but the history of color,
dyes washed out of laundry, cloth and cloud,
mystical rouge, lipstick, eye shadows? Harlot nature,
explain the color of tongue, lips, nipples,
against Death come ons of labia, penis, the anus,
the concupiscent color wheels of insects and birds,
explain why Christian gold and blue tempt the kneeling,
why Moslem green is miraculous in the desert,
why the personification of the rainbow is Iris,
the mother of Eros, why Adam in Hebrew
comes out of the redness of earth

There’s more, much more, in this poem, that runs seven pages, wheeling us through civilizations, literatures, and arts—but all the Mossian resonances are here in these opening lines, the Biblical, the bodily, and above all, the rhetorical roll. Color is used here almost as a guide, like Virgil for Dante; it puts him in touch with paintings, clothing, decorations, but his main subjects are the two big ones, love and death, very frequently his subjects—and how would they not be?—throughout.

Moss is omnivorous, though; he has as many subjects as appetites. And often, as in his title poem, he’s writing what would usually be intellectual, “Song of Alphabets,” “Allegory of Smell,” Judaica. But his heady propensities are infused with life. I can’t think of anyone whose imagery is more visceral than Moss’s:

I can’t speak for Lincoln,
any more than I can sing for Caruso
—toward the end when Caruso sang,
his mouth filled with blood.
Not every poet bites into his own jugular:
some hunger, some observe the intelligence of clouds.
I was surprised to see a heart come out
of the torn throat of a snake. I know a poet
whose father blew his brains out
before his son was born, who still leads his son
into the unknown, the unknowable.

That amazing passage is from “In Front of a Poster of Garibaldi,” and the poet referred to there at the end is Stanley Kunitz. So let’s look at one more poem, personal, lest we think of Moss as only orotund, to that very Kunitz, himself. It follows the Garibaldi poem four pages later in the book:

Creature to creature,
two years before we met
I remember I passed his table
at the Cedar Tavern.
He who never knew his father
seemed to view all strangers
as his father’s good ghost,
any passing horse as capable
of being Pegasus, or pissing
in the street.
I who knew my father
was wary of any tame raccoon
with claws and real teeth.
At our first meeting forty years ago,
before the age of discovery.
I argued through the night
against the tragic sense of life;
I must have thought God wrote in spit.
(from “Song for Stanley Kunitz”)

I sense a sweetness there, as between friends who’ve grown together in time. The tone is still Jovian, though, or Jehovan, and again there are bodily fluids, the spit used to show that God, not unlike Stanley Moss, writes for keeps.

—Richard Silberg

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From Forward

The apocryphal Hebrew book, Ecclesiasticus, is attributed to the sage Ben Sira who, it is said, was so wise that he refused to be born and held a considerable debate with various rabbinic authorities from within the womb before finally consenting to emerge from it. As soon as he entered this world, he began spouting wisdom.

There’s no question that Alexander Fu—an actual child who, at the time Stanley Moss composed this poem, was about 11 months old—has nothing to lose in the comparison with Ben Sira, for his wisdom is apparent here.

Or do we owe some credit to the poet who ventriloquized Alexander's voice, if not actually from the belly of a mother, at least from a diapered child? And which exactly is the child and which the wise old man? An exchange of roles is hinted when the infant observes, “You are wetting your pants to talk to me.”

Born in New York City, Stanley Moss was educated at Trinity College and Yale University. He is a private art dealer specializing in Italian and Spanish old masters, as well as the publisher and editor of The Sheep Meadow Press, a nonprofit press devoted to poetry. Moss told the Forward that he has written five poems about Alexander, three of which can be found in his latest collection, “A History of Color: New and Gathered Poems,” (Seven Stories Press, 2003). It's a terrific collection spanning a considerable career, from “The Wrong Angel” (MacMillan, 1966) to “Asleep in the Garden: New and Selected Poems” (Seven Stories, 1997), with 40 new poems to boot.

With such a long career, and such lively writing, Moss is to my mind a splendid poet who speaks to the Jewish American experience with depth, varied culture, passion and humor. And wisdom. He has earned the possibility of joking, as he does in this poem, with his own mortality, or, as Alexander implies here, with his citizenship in the society of time. (“We live in two societies....”) His poems are full of arguments, not only with babies, but with mortality and with God, and these impassioned inner debates between intimations of heaven and sensations of the earth remind me greatly of the Psalms.

—Roger Kamenetz