From Poetry 

Stanley Moss’s poetry is ambitious in its range of cultural allusion as well as simply in the geography it covers. His new poems move from New York to the Near East, from Germany and Italy to Japan and China. This is not, however, a tourist’s recapitulation of picturesque scenes. The poet’s various locales are less occasions for description than they are triggers of meditation: they may be said to represent, or at least to make apparent, states of the soul. The observations are trenchant, not chatty in the matter of art appreciation. In “The Poor of Venice,” which contains the wonderful line “The rich and poor don’t share a plate of beans,” the last lines juxtapose the city’s beauty and the injustice it is founded on:

Salute an old Venetian after his work,
eating his polenta without quail; he sits
on a slab in the freezing mist, looking back
at the lagoon and his marble city:
years of illusion, backache, sewerage, and clouds.

And in “I Have Come to Jerusalem” the setting dissolves in the poet’s fantasy of reunion with his dead forebears: encountering his grandmother “in a large reception room filled with strangers / wearing overcoats,” he extends his recovery of the past:

I remembered the smells of her bedroom:
lace-covered pillows, a face powdered Old Testament.
Then my dead mother and father came into the room.
I showed them whom I’d found and gave everybody chocolates,
we spoke of what was new
and they called me only by my secret name.

 In many fine poems in this book, Moss manages to sustain this haunting simplicity of statement, bittersweet in image and tone. I would instance “For Margaret,” about his mother’s dying, and a set of religious poems which wrestle Jacob-like with God: “Work Song,” “The Battle,” “You and I,” and “The Altar.” In “Elegy for Myself” mortality is deftly figured as a grammatical shift:

Place him with they love and they wrote,
not he loves and he writes. It took so much pain
for those “S”s to fly off.

When I have questions about this poet’s work they usually concern that allusiveness I began by mentioning. Sometimes the net seems too wide-flung. The problem isn’t just one of incongruity of images; it is one of inconstancy of tone. The sudden sophisticated reference sorts ill with the studied simplicity which precedes it. Curiously, such lapses often occur at the endings of poems: Helen and Clytemnestra traipse by to no great purpose toward the close of “New York Song,” as Hector and Andromache do in “Rainbows and Circumcision.” A stark, otherwise effective reminiscence of visiting James Wright as he lay dying in a hospital ends:

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.

A deliberate incongruity, no doubt; but as a surprise it fails because the object of the irony is unclear. What we are jarred by, in the wrong way, is the sudden distortion of tone, as the plainspoken humility of the description of the dying poet gives way to a glancing estheticism. It is hard to imagine the same voice speaking these lines as well as the rest of the poem. This recurrent problem—the associative leap that overshoots its target—puzzles me; but it is fortunately not a distraction which compromises greatly the pleasure this book more often than not generously provides.

—Robert B. Shaw

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From Triquarterly 

Just as deconstruction has tried to dismantle “voice” in favor of writing, so has Marxist criticism attempted to dismember the “self” as the last infirmity of the bourgeois mind. Still, a book of poetry naturally provokes, as Auden once remarked, curiosity about the mechanics of poems and about the person behind them. Both as a first cause (the poet as maker of language) and as a construct (the poet as product of language), the poetic Self continues to entice readers by at least seeming to speak to them. Even when reviewing a single volume, rather than an entire career, one is tempted to add flesh to the skeleton, resonance to the voice and extra dimensions to the inevitably flat cartoon of the self inferable from within. “What kind of person,” we ask ourselves, “wrote this book?”

These four poets can be ranged along an axis of familiarity, in part because of their language, in part because of their subjects. Brooks Haxton writes the sort of openly autobiographical poems, about or addressed to family and friends, that enable one to see him in relation to a life lived in this world. Stanley Moss, less overtly personal, has a language so scrupulously discursive, and writes with such a biblically paratactic style, that he often disappears beneath the prophetic cloak that his poems wear.

Although Stanley Moss evokes Yeats when he refers to “a quarrel with myself,” The Intelligence of Clouds is a book of neither struggle nor anguish. “Not every poet bites into his own jugular,” he announces (“In Front of a Poster of Garibaldi”): “some hunger, some observe the intelligence of clouds.” He is among the latter, looking at the signs of the visible universe with an eye to their hints of the invisible and transcendent. Reading nature and language, Moss resembles Howard Nemerov, that philosopher-seer who also takes an interest in visual emblems and the script of the universe available to us in observed or found objects. Where the resemblance to Nemerov stops, is in Moss’s unhesitating seriousness. He proclaims an Old Testament bias early on: “I can believe a cloud gave us the laws, / parted the Red Sea, gave us the flood, / the rainbow. A cloud teaches kindness, / be prepared for the worst wind, be light of spirit.” (“Song of Alphabets”). Nemerov takes delight in reading the calligraphy of swallows’ wings, or the lettered traces of skaters’ inscriptions on ice; Moss derives little enjoyment: “I cannot tell vowel from consonant, / the signs of the vulnerability of the flesh / from signs for laws and government.”

Moss shies away from both wit and self-wounding. He doesn’t wish to burden his readers with bloodied messes and he makes relatively modest claims for his, or anyone’s, work:

“I believe poetry / like kindness changes the world, a little” (“Song of Introduction”). The closest he gets to genuine struggle is in an adaptation of a work by the thirteenth-century Hebrew poet Abraham Abulafia. “The Battle,” a psychomachia between soul and spirit, identifies the former with God and blood, the latter with creativity and ink. And although this little allegory posits a battle, the poet’s spirit triumphs handily over his soul, “and the ink defeated the blood, and the Sabbath / overcame all the days of the week.”

If the triumph of poetic labor over the other claims on a man’s attention (soul, family, God) is equivalent to the crowning of the rest of the week by the Sabbath, it is automatic. Merely to claim this, as Moss does, may ultimately fail to persuade readers with a greater taste for Sturin und Drang or even for formal variety. What I have referred to as an Old

Testament quality in his verse is readily observable in his subjects and locales (a whole series of poems from Israel, for example), and, more important, in his language and syntax. For the most part straightforward, Moss’s sentences usually forgo both subordination and unusual line breaks.

Take, for instance, the opening section of the “Garibaldi” poem:

When my Italian son
admired a poster of Garibaldi
in the piazzetta of Venice,
a national father in red shirt,
gold chain, Moroccan fez and fancy beard,
I wished the boy know the Lincoln
who read after a day’s work,
the honesty, the commoner.
My knees hurt from my life and playing soccer
—not that I see Lincoln splashing with his kids
in the Potomac. Lord knows where his dead son led him.

The long first sentence is, of course, a grammatically complex one, but it so simply aligned along the page that it strikes us as simpler than it is. Even when Moss syncopates his line breaks, working them against the syntactic or grammatical grain, we can see, almost immediately, what he is up to:

The poor of Venice know the gold mosic
of 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”)

Every line ending corresponds to the end of a semantic unit, except the first, which deliberately runs on to undermine our expectations, as if tempting us to think that “the poor of Venice know the gold mosaic…of San Marco,” before delivering the final ironic punch. But in general Moss’s poetry is solid, four-square; despite his eye for clouds, natural writing and the filigree in lace-making, Moss is never delicate, witty or fanciful when dealing with subjects that he might treat instead with sturdy sobriety.

He shares that sobriety with two poets whom he addresses, Stanley Kunitz and James Wright. Like both of them he watches the world for details which he may appropriate and make poetic use of. Talismans abound, evidence of design or found significance, as in the opening details of “For James Wright,” concerning a visit to the poet on his deathbed:

Hell’s asleep now.
On the sign above your bed
nothing by mouth
I read abandon hope.

With no bravado, the hospital becomes the gateway to the underworld. Speaking and writing, like reading and writing, become the pivots for the visit. The dying poet awakes “speechless” and must write his farewells on a yellow pad: “I don’t feel defeated.” Under the guise of such reportorial honesty, Moss makes his Dantean allusion gently. He takes his farewell with a hint of self-renunciation:

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.

To walk out “on” the poet is to abandon him to his fate; to transform him into a French garden proleptically completes Wright’s metamorphosis into a depicted scene, a burial plot, in which his immortality is ensured. Likewise, in his “Song for Stanley Kunitz,” Moss keeps Kunitz’s gift of a petrified clam as a talisman on his desk, and reminds us calmly what it metonymically “stands for”:

My old clam stands for periodicity,
is my sweet reminder
of heartbeat and poetry, seasons, tides, music,
all phases of all moons, light-years, menses.
Tomorrow I shall wear it for one of my eyes,
a monocle for my talk on the relationship
between paleontology and anthropology.

 The poem ends with an homage to Kunitz as a real and metaphorical gardener, writing in the soil a message to God:

…how could he face the moon, or the land
beside his house without a garden? Unthinkable.
I think what is written in roses, iris and trumpet vine
is read by the Lord God.
Such a place of wild and ordered beauty
is like a heart that takes on the sorrows
of the world. . . He translates into all tongues.

 These last lines are among the few opacities in the volume. “He” may represent the God who, having read the natural or poetic beauties of gardeners such as Kunitz, translates those beauties into the lingua franca of each particular setting; or it may be Kunitz himself, whose intransitive activity Moss is praising (as if to say “it is easy to translate Kunitz into all tongues”). Or else, perhaps Kunitz is like God the Son, taking upon himself the sorrows of the world.

Moss’s poems maintain a quiet, plain eloquence, with neither epideictic fireworks nor flushes of late Romantic feeling. In a fourteen-line “Elegy for Myself,” he intimates in biblical undertones his keenest wish: to speak for many, just as his ashes are scattered, and he is himself “no longer singular”:

…Plural now he is all the mourners
of his father’s house, and all the nights and mornings too.
Place him with they love and they wrote,
not he loves and he writes. It took so much pain
for those “S”s to fly off.. It took so much trouble
to need a new part of speech. Now he is
something like a good small company of actors;
the text, not scripture, begins, “I am laughing.”

The autobiographical poet attempting to be universal usually chooses either the analogical path of Wordsworth in The Prelude (“What one is, why may not many be?”), or a version of Keats’s chameleon poet, dividing himself among sparrow, gravel and setting sun. Here, Moss claims to have become like Auden’s version of Yeats, “his admirers”; he abandons himself to plurality until the very last words, where he reasserts his own, or the text’s, singularity. We have here a self that both affirms and denies its own power.

—Willard Spiegelman

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 From English Studies