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...
