This article is taken from PN Review 288, Volume 52 Number 4, March - April 2026.
A Member of the Awkward Squad
Stanley Moss, Goddamned Selected Poems (Carcanet) £16.99
Almost twenty years ago I made the mistake of reviewing Stanley Moss’s Songs of Imperfection along with three other collections. Yet Moss’s abundant vitality, his self-mythologizing and frequent surrealism in the face of the world and the word were monopolizing. It is the sheer relish that he took in life, coupled with a bravado, eroticism and compassion, which draws us to him. In a boisterous mood he is a satyr; in another he is an Old Testament contrarian wrestling with God; in a third a clown performing somersaults.
Until the age of ninety-eight, Moss (1925-2024) remained manically productive. He was prepared to live as long, he reckoned, as the bristlecone pine he took to be his ‘lost brother’. The zest for life we find in ‘I Choose to Write a Poem’ is everywhere in this collection. Even when handicapped by injury:
‘A History of Color’ is Moss at his showiest and finest. It is a pyrotechnic exercise in the pleasure of excess, flamboyantly illustrating his penchant for wild allusions, eroticism and adventuring thought:
Almost twenty years ago I made the mistake of reviewing Stanley Moss’s Songs of Imperfection along with three other collections. Yet Moss’s abundant vitality, his self-mythologizing and frequent surrealism in the face of the world and the word were monopolizing. It is the sheer relish that he took in life, coupled with a bravado, eroticism and compassion, which draws us to him. In a boisterous mood he is a satyr; in another he is an Old Testament contrarian wrestling with God; in a third a clown performing somersaults.
Until the age of ninety-eight, Moss (1925-2024) remained manically productive. He was prepared to live as long, he reckoned, as the bristlecone pine he took to be his ‘lost brother’. The zest for life we find in ‘I Choose to Write a Poem’ is everywhere in this collection. Even when handicapped by injury:
My soul is dancing,
welcoming spring in the garden
on a beautiful June morning,
ready to live forever.
‘A History of Color’ is Moss at his showiest and finest. It is a pyrotechnic exercise in the pleasure of excess, flamboyantly illustrating his penchant for wild allusions, eroticism and adventuring thought:
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 ...
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