Skull of Adam
The sadness of biblical loss: the prophet in Gaza without his God: the melancholy of the modern finding its beauty in loss itself. And I realized that Moss had struck upon 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
Absolutely first-rate.
—Richard Hugo
From The New York Times Book Review
Anguish seems to be on Stanley Moss’s mind in this new book, but it appears more as a searched-for subject than as a suffered fate. “I fly the flag of the menstruating black dog,” begins a poem that ends with these lines:
I sprawl with my dog on the floorof all night restaurants
because the entire shape of time
is a greater, more ferocious beast
than anything in it.
The large, philosophical abstraction (“the entire shape of time”) has more urgency for Moss than the feral imagination. Despite poems entitled “Snot” and “Vomit,” the shocks in the book seem willed, forced. For me a key line was “If only I could coin nightmares,” where the slack metaphoric verb drained the energy from the longing to know fear. Mr. Moss has many longings, many unsettled accounts, but his poems often conclude on a strained or flat note. “The Debt” starts with the line, “I owe a debt to the night,” and ends “It is the night itself that provides / a forgiveness.”
Undoubtedly Mr. Moss needs his extravagances and excesses, and now and then the shock is somewhere between too deliberate and too uncontrolled, as when he refers to a famous comedian as “a Jahweh clown, rectal thermometer of the world.” In “The Meeting,” he mistakes a pillowcase blowing across the road for a swan struck by a car, and questions his own penchant for extremes: “Why did I need this illusion,/ a beauty lying helpless?” But the book spends more time displaying this need than questioning it. Now and again we hear of both the “sacred and defiled,” and one poem ends by claiming:
You can always finda little sanguine drawing
of paradise in hell.
But the irony of “little” makes the affirmation of “sanguine” less than a saving grace.
From Stand
Skull of Adam, by Stanley Moss, produces the skull in the excellent first poem, ‘On Seeing an X-Ray of My Head’, where it is characterized as “This face without race or religion, / I have in common with humanity’ —a basic and, at first sight, a secure definition of identity. But the world which Moss creates is one in which touchstones of belief often turn out to be illusory, or to reveal themselves as mere camouflage. The perspective is specifically a Jewish one too, with God very much the unknowable, unrepresentable Jahweh, and death an unalleviated darkness ahead. Nearly all the poems in the book’s opening section, with their uncompromising titles (‘Snot’, ‘Shit’, ‘Vomit’), represent an attempt not to affront the fastidious but genuinely to establish a base, a set of values. But of course nothing is as simple as that, and the second section explores the difficulties of relationships—with earthly and heavenly fathers, and with women. The need to feel a distinct identity in the face of God and death is given a further twist in the third section—’I wanted my voice to be a different, moon-like thing’—a reminder of the original meaning of the word ‘prophet’, one who gives news, as well as a comment on the traditional ambitions of poets. Against such bafflement the poet sets the particularities of creation and the consolations of love: but at the end, as he says in one poem, ‘I know more of what isn’t than what is’. What distinguishes this book is the way in which, without whining, it mobilises bewilderment—and there is a strength in the writing and some the images which is both arresting and moving, as here in the image of a whale:
Surfacing as if it were going to die,with a last disassociated vision,
|one eye at peace
peers down into the valleys and mountains
of the ocean, the other eye floats,
tries to talk with its lid to the multitude.
But in this chameleon world, ‘visions hide more than they reveal’: and just as the only available knowledge of life may involve probing the darkness, so an awareness of the soul may depend, Mr. Moss implies, on coming to terms with those opening poems about the body.
From The Nation
Stanley Moss neither shocks nor torments, though he does score an occasional point for the cause of scatology. These poems are accessible, simple almost to the point of artlessness, but with surprising rewards. Often autobiographical or commemorative, Moss never lapses into confession or sentimentality. Instead, he conducts a ritual of preparation for the unpredictable coursings of spirit, acknowledging that “Flesh is a ghost, inarticulate.”
There is a pleasing urgency here (“I have not used my darkness well”), as well as a counterbalanced appreciation of suffering and mercy: “You can always find / a little sanguine drawing / of paradise in Hell.” Concerned about the meaning he conjures, Moss does what other poets are supposed to do: he puts life into words and gives words a life of their own.
From City Miner
Stanley Moss dives into the darker side of his life and comes out chastened, but still singing. As he concludes in the final poem, “The Branch,” “Sacred and defiled / my soul is right / to deal with me in secret.”
From Publishers Weekly
Solitude is the key note of Stanley Moss’s new collection: mortality is its theme. According to the poet, Adam is the first and only man in the world, as well as the man whose actions barred humanity from the garden of eternal life. His skull, like Yorick’s, is the souvenir that survives its own death—a nasty paradox that drives Moss to write poetry and may, he suggests, have driven the poets who wrote the Bible to “invent” God. Three of his exquisite songs probe the short lives of the frog, the potato and the clam. But Moss’s real alter ego is Zero Mostel, “a Jahweh clown,” in whose name he writes: “If you love life / you simply can’t believe / how bad it is.” The book was a long time in the making, and its poems have already been honored in many quarters. The whole being more than its parts, Skull of Adam is sure to receive critical attention. Like all good poetry, it invites rereading.