Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Poems of a Lifetime of Passion and Grumpiness

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-4253055

2164-0041

David Danoff,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

STANLEY MOSS has been a longtime fixture on the poetry scene. He’s worked as an editor at New Directions, the New York Herald Tribune, the New American Review, and elsewhere; and he founded the Sheep Meadow Press, dedicated to poetry in English and translation. He’s enjoyed friendships with Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz, Yehuda Amichai, W.S. Merwin, and many others. But his work as a poet has received less attention than his activity as an editor, publisher, and literary man-about-town.As Moss approaches his 92nd birthday, the wittily titled Almost Complete Poems brings his poetry to the forefront. The book chronicles a seven-decade career writing poems that are erudite and whimsical, parabolic and plainspoken, obsessed with God (and His absence), the natural world (especially dogs and trees), the mechanics of language (and poetry), and the human body (especially female bodies). It’s a capacious collection, and it bears witness to a considerable poetic talent, albeit one that is hard to pin down or affix a label to.Moss got off to a somewhat slow start as a poet, with his first book appearing at age 41 and his second at age 54. But he seems to be accelerating in his twilight years, with roughly half the poems in this 600-page volume having appeared after the age of 78 (fully one-third after the age of 88, i.e. in the last three years). The persona in his late poems bears some resemblance to Yeats’ “Wild Old Wicked Man”: aggressive, frankly carnal, unembarrassed by his animal urges, and perhaps a bit eager to shock the reader. But even his early works are not the poems of a “young person.” Beginning with his first collection, the persona is worldly, irreverent, and glutted with experience. From the start, he’s feasting in the shadow of mortality:Give me a death like Buddha’s. Let me fallover from eating mushrooms Provençale,a peasant wine pouring down my shirtfront,my last request not a cry but a grunt.His poems often take the form of little parables or allegories. The symbolism is teased out gently from an image or idea, sometimes in multiple directions at once. In an early poem titled “Clams,” he seems to be both celebrating the innocence of life and cursing its stupidity:Ancient of Days, bless the innocentwho can do nothing but cling,open or close their stone mouths . . . .Bless all things unaware that perceivelife and death as comfort or discomfort:bless their great dumbness.We die misinformedwith our mouths of shell open.At the last moment, as our lives fall off,a gull lifts us, drops us on the rocks, barebecause the tide is out. Flesh sifts the sludge.The early work tends to be shorter and a little more impersonal than it will later become. There’s an impatience, a bluntness, a stripping away of anything merely decorative, as in the title poem of his second book, “On Seeing an X-Ray of My Head”:This face without race or religionI have in common with humanity —mouth without lips, jaws without tongue,this face does not sleep when I sleep,gives no hint of love or pleasure . . .I don’t look as if I work for a living.In his later work, Moss relaxes into longer, sometimes sprawling and garrulous poems that touch very explicitly upon his family history, his wives and children, his body, his appetites, and his friends. The title poem of his 2003 collection, “A History of Color,” begins with a riotous explosion of imagery and associations, both sacred and profane:What is heaven but the history of color,dyes washed out of laundry, cloth and cloud,mystical rouge, lipstick, eyeshadow? 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 Muslim green is miraculous in the desert,why the personification of the rainbow is Iris,why Aphrodite, the mother of Eros, marriedthe god of fire, why Adam in Hebrewcomes out of the redness of earth . . .The poem continues like this for six pages, mustering every sort of vision or allusion in a struggle with the idea of death: “I fight death with peppermints, a sweet to recall / the Dark Ages before the word Orange existed.” Art is one possible means of resistance, but unreliable:Against oblivion a still life of two red applesstands for a beautiful woman. On her shoulderthe bruise of a painter’s brush — she is no morethan a still life of peasant shoes.“You will not keep apples or shoes or France,” Death says.It’s in the raw material of life itself — sex, generation — that the poet finds his best hope for a color that may endure:A master can draw every passion with a pencil, but light,shadow and dark cannot reveal the lavender irisbetween the opened thighs of a girl still almost a child,or, before life was through with her, the red and purplepomegranate at the center of her being.Moss is not shy about sex. In fact, he seems to closely associate it with poetry. In the fascinating prose memoir “Diary of a Satyr,” he links his vocation as a poet and his emergent masculinity with an image from classical European art: “In my seventh year, I had a revelation. A teacher asked me a question. I knew the answer . . . . ‘I am certain I am a poet.’ Then Miss Green said, ‘I knew it. You, Stanley, are a bronze satyr,’ and she wacked my erect penis with a twelve-inch Board of Education wooden ruler.” The piece goes on to describe early travels abroad with his family, including bold erotic encounters: “I wandered off alone into the red light district of Algiers. An auburn-haired, tattooed lady smelling of flowers and sweat kissed me for nothing behind a beaded curtain. She touched a naked breast to my lips.”There are Oedipal elements: his father he compares to “an angry centaur,” his mother to “a bronze Lucretia” threatening to “stab herself in the heart with a kitchen knife.” This world of violent classical art fits uneasily with his family’s secular Judaism: “We were a family of atheists; still, we celebrated an occasional seder with uncles, aunts, and their children, most of whom kept away from me, lest I molest them.” The portrait is of a headstrong boy, ravenous for experience, with a certain degree of contempt for the world he came from, who keeps kicking against that world and who never feels at ease until he learns what he “is”— and travels to Europe, works as a writer, befriends other poets. But even then, he can’t fully leave behind his origins; the memoir ends with a description of his parents’ graves.He writes often of his Jewish heritage, and of God, but almost always at a wary distance: “I pray weary of his nothingness my No God / will not call back his dogs: Night and Day, / or, for his pleasure, let slip another flood.” Alongside his literary pursuits, Moss has made his living as a private art dealer, specializing in Italian and Spanish old masters, and Christian imagery is at least as frequent a presence in his poetry as Jewish imagery. Christian and Jewish motifs are generally presented in tandem, as though insisting upon their equivalence — and most of the time they both are overshadowed by pantheistic themes:When I was young and prodigal,I dived into God’s womb and the ocean.God spoke to me as I swamthrough a thousand reflections,his face and my face touchedlike Mary’s cheek on the cheek of her deposed son.God washed across my face. My face was in him.From time to time I spit him out as I swam.Moss revels in joining the high and low, the human and animal, the sacred and profane, smashing every sort of experience together with a mischievous grin, as in the late poem “Pollen”:It is time to uncover the mirrors —there is no death in the family now.It is time we wear each other’s skin,fur, scales, feathers, our mouths covered with pollen;let’s sing insect and reptilian songs.It is time for the carnival of love.What kind of a poet is he, ultimately? There are confessional elements: you will hear a fair amount about his difficult relationship with his father, his grief following his mother’s death, and the children he raised and didn’t raise. He’s a poet of place: you will visit his homes at Montauk, Long Island, and Dutchess County, New York, explore his garden, his art collection, and watch his dogs run around. He’s a poet of ideas, frequently losing himself in abstract reveries about Time, Death, Language, etc. He’s also an insistent chronicler of the body in all its majesty and indignity: there are poems titled “Shit,” “Vomit,” “Snot,” “Spit,” “Piss,” and one about Theodore Roethke soiling himself on a train. There are many fine poems in this book, showing Moss the equal of any of his poetic cohort, and also quite stronger than a few.It’s a record of a lifetime of wisdom and folly, passion and grumpiness, recorded in poems that sometimes crackle with invention and inspiration, and other times just fill up another page. Perhaps the experience of reading this collection can best be summed up in the words of Walt Whitman: “Who touches this, touches a man.”