New & Selected Poems, 2006
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 & Selected Poems 2006.
—John Ashbery
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 lovesongs of anguish, songs any of us would sing if we could. I find them disconcerting and extraordinarily moving.
—Hayden Carruth
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.
—W.S. Merwin
Magisterial…this book 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, Poetry London
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
This is a book 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
It is time to celebrate the singular beauty and power of Stanley Moss’s poetry....The damp genius of mortality presides.
—Stanley Kunitz
From Publisher's Weekly
Long admired for his stewardship of Sheep Meadow Press, Moss has also earned acclaim for his own lyrical work, whose long-lined eloquence mixes autobiographical reflections, tributes to friends and places, and a temperate, self-assured humor. Though Moss's last volume, The History of Color (2003), was also a new-and-selected, this slightly slimmer gathering holds enough new poems to merit a look of its own: advancing years, the death of friends (especially eminent poets, such as Stanley Kunitz), Jewish history and Jewish liturgy provide recurrent themes for Moss's latest works, with which the volume (mostly) opens. (Moss's perhaps confusing arrangement offers new work first, the oldest last, "with exceptions" so he can group poems with similar subjects.) There are travels overseas to Jerusalem and Israel, in particular, but also to Italy, China, Germany and voyages backward in time, as Moss reanimates Ovidian themes. His best poems, however, are less about ethnic or religious heritage than about crafts and arts undervalued in their own time: "The Lace Makers," for example, and the new "An American Hero," which tells the startling story of James Hewlett, who "joined a Shakespeare theater of ex-slaves."
From The East Hampton Star
Unlike God, the poet Stanley Moss believes in revising his creations. How else to explain his latest volume of
poems, “New and Selected Poems 2006,” appearing only three years after his last volume, “A History of Color: New and Collected Poems”?
New poems — as best I can tell — make up approximately one quarter of the new book, and these are generally superb. But while “A History of Color” organizes Mr. Moss’s poems book by book (“very roughly in reverse chronological order,” according to the author’s note) and identifies to which period in Mr. Moss’s career each poem originally belongs, “New and Selected 2006” makes no such attribution. The new author’s note claims that the poems again appear in “reverse chronological order” with exceptions “for reasons of entertainment and matter.”
So what’s going on? Evidently, like Walt Whitman and his “Leaves of Grass,” Mr. Moss seems intent on giving his readers the work of a lifetime, meticulously tinkered with to reflect his current philosophical and aesthetic foundations, amending his oeuvre with each new grouping of poems.
In the earlier collected edition, Mr. Moss in his author’s note writes, “A number of poems from early collections have been reworked. I am certain no reader will miss the early versions.” With the publication of this recent book, it’s clear that Mr. Moss is not easily satisfied and will not hesitate to resculpt his poems.
W.S. Merwin — one of Mr. Moss’s peers — wrote in his own “Selected Poems” that he would not revise his poems because he is “no longer the person who wrote them.” Mr. Moss, obviously fastidious
about improving his work, might revise because he is not the same person.
For example, the poem “A Sketch of Slaves, Prisoners in Concentration Camps and Unhappy Lovers” appears in “A History of Color” as “A Sketch of Slaves, Jews in Concentration Camps and Unhappy Lovers.” The title’s emendation from “Jews” to “Prisoners” is apt and more broadly humanizes the poem; with the change, the poet seems to take into account world events that have transpired since 1966 — genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, for instance.
Interestingly, Mr. Moss has also altered the poem’s conclusion. In “A History of Color,” the poem concludes, “You who are free,/ relax, your stomachs will soon settle./Isn’t it May? Aren’t you happy as larks?” In the latest edition these lines are excised, and the poem ends, “I thumb through the naked corpses for my hidden life.”
In this latest version, the persona no longer apostrophizes the reader, who the persona earlier suggests will not long suffer from a troubled conscience (or an upset stomach). Clearly, the earlier version’s persona sounds ironic, sarcastic, and self-righteous. But how can we read a poem about suffering slaves, concentration camp victims, and unhappy lovers and return to our larking?
The new ending is less accusatory and more ambiguous. What are we to make of this persona now? Is the speaker a detainee, a guard, a slave, a poet, or simply an unhappy lover? What are we to make of a persona who equates the unhappiness of unrequited love with life in a concentration camp? The phrase “thumb through” in the new final line
suggests indifference, boredom, inattention; one wouldn’t thumb through corpses the way in which we thumb through magazines in a doctor’s waiting room. The speaker, perhaps wearied by the world’s lack of love, searches almost lackadaisically for his “hidden life,” frightened of what may be found there.
Mr. Moss’s revisions and additions throughout this latest volume make it superior to “A History of Color” in “reasons of entertainment and matter.” But what exactly is contained in a Moss poem?
Readers will learn that he is influenced by the modernists of the early 20th century. His poems, highly allusive (brush up on your Bible and your Bullfinch), brim with references to the pantheon of gods Greek, Roman, Judaic, Christian, Islamic, and Egyptian with whom he converses. He curses, questions, and implores them. He neither raises one above the other nor worships them; he berates the gods equally. The poet implies that the gods that command our attention, our devotion, who are responsible for life and death, for love and vanity, may not be worth our adulation.
The final poem of the first section of “New and Selected 2006,” “In the Rain,” sums up his position well. Here are the first 10 lines:
There are principles I would die for,
but not to worship this God or that. To live
I’d kneel before the Egyptian insect god, the dung beetle
who rolls a ball of mud or dung across the ground
as if he were moving the solar disc or host across the sky.
I would pray to a blue scarab inlaid in lapis lazuli
suggestive of the heavens.
The Lord is many. I sit waiting at the feet of a baboon god
counterfeit to counterfeit. My Lord smiles, barks and scratches,
all prayers to him are the honking of geese.
In poem after poem Mr. Moss invokes or addresses one god or another. Gods appear variously as “The Good Shepherd” (the poem’s speaker is a sheep who knows there’s “only a thin line/between the good shepherd and the butcher”), “my dearest and least dear father” in “Grace,” and, in “Jerusalem: Easter, Passover,” the persona claims, “I catch myself almost praying/for the first time in my life,/ to a God I treat like a nettle/on my trouser cuff.”
What do the speakers of these poems generally want from these gods? Love and the mercy of more time. The persona of “Psalm” begs, “My Shepherd, let me continue to just pass/in the army of the living, keep me from the ranks of the excellent dead,” ending with, “My Shepherd, I want, I want, I want.”
Learned subject matter is not all that has garnered Stanley Moss his considerable poetic reputation. The revision of earlier poems shows that he has developed a greater facility for poetic language. His lines — in free verse or in more closed, experimental forms — are taut and musical, buoyant in a way that belies their density.
Mr. Moss obviously cares as much about how his lines sound as about how they mean, a trait increasingly hard to find in contemporary poetry, much of which reads like prose cut into lines. If he has not adopted a particular stanza form or rhyme scheme, he’s modifying one, such as the changes made to the eight-line stanza used by Yeats. In poems such as “Ransom” (first stanza) and “Satyr Songs,” Mr. Moss uses only two rhymes in each stanza rather than three, quite an accomplishment in rhyme-poor English.
Often, the poems are held together by assonance, alliteration, and consonance, as in the first stanza of “Over Drinks”:
The day is a lion across the horizon,
the forests, a thorn in its foot,
it gnaws on hapless years, its stomach full.
The lion rolls on its back kicking the heavens.
The lion of Judah is part of its pride, its mate —
some say the favorite.
So here is a book to please your intellect and your ear. Stanley Moss’s “New and Selected Poems 2006” is by turns funny, prophetic, and profound. Here is a life’s work under construction, pressured into change by artistic discontent. Like the ancient myth-makers, Mr. Moss humanizes the gods, and their lives reflect our own. This is a generous collection from a skilled poet, a romantic classicist who reinterprets the past and the gods to make sense of the selves he and his readers are in the process of becoming.
—Dan Giancola