Search results for ""author stanley moss""

A collection of new and selected poems about life, love, and growing older.

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`Death is a many-colored harlequin,’ Stanley Moss affirmed on his ninety-second birthday. Rosanna Warren writes of his latest poems, `Undaunted, outrageously alive, Moss flaunts more colors than the Grim Reaper ever dreamed of, laughs in his face, rhymes with abandon, makes a joyful noise unto the Lord, and struts with Baudelaire. This is a book to hold onto for dear life.’ And dear life is what Moss’s poetry has always been about, asking what John Ashbery called `unthinkable questions, but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight.’ Stanley Moss has been part of the American and European scene for seven decades: a defining editor of world poetry, he is a major poet of the generation of Ashbery, Merwin, Wright and Kinnell. This book richly supplements his Almost Complete Poems (Carcanet, 2017) with recovered writings and new-minted poems that address the monsters of the age while celebrating its angels.

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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 Muslims 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. Or putting it another way: 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 Mosss 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.

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"Rejoicing" is a magnificent, celebratory gathering of Stanley Moss' poetry from six decades. He is one of America's finest poets and this collection demonstrates why. Marilyn Hacker wrote of his work, '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', and in Britain John Fuller wrote: 'Stanley Moss' poems are fresh and unpredictable, full of colour and wisdom. As a poetry that engages the philosophical mind it seems characteristically American in its scope and cultural engagement, but there is also the generous warmth of a mind at ease in its body, open to surprises and possibilities'.

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Many tensions are at work in the playfully unconstrained poems of Stanley Moss: ordinary and mythical lives, the political and the personal, high art and low comedy intermingle, achieving an effect that is often surreal and always striking. Here, God and Death are not matters for detached speculation but constant and vivid presences, whether centre-stage or waiting in the wings. An engagement with history is brought to bear on legend and on current affairs: a poem addressing 9/11 summons up the figure of Walt Whitman, whose exuberance and resolute faith in humanity Moss echoes throughout the book. Serious and optimistic, light and dark, "Songs of Imperfection" is an uplifting and celebratory book.

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