Asleep in the Garden: New and Selected Poems

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0856462985 ISBN 13: 9780856462986

Publisher: Anvil Press Poetry, 1998

Book of poetry.

Review:

Although Stanley Moss appears to be working in the confessional style, his concerns in Asleep in the Garden are clearly spiritual. And while the confessional poets strove to make language itself the site of the action, Moss adopts a more transparent and classical style, using experience without drawing attention to himself. Instead of ego we get observation; instead of hyperbole, understatement. Moving effortlessly across space and time, Moss's poetry transports us from Munich to Jerusalem to Mexico to China (in "April, Beijing"):

In China "ashes to ashes and dust to dust" means something more; work, no matter how cruel, is part prophecy, workers in the same field--

with the same wooden plow
that was Chinese 8000 years ago--
the shape of a character in calligraphy, face
ashes and dust, whose windy fortress takes on a
spiritual form: the Great Wall.

It's no accident that one of the central poems in the collection is titled "The Geographer." Moss, like Joseph Brodsky and Robert Lowell, reminds us that poetry can still teach us something about the world. --Mark Rudman

About the Author:

Born in New York City, STANLEY MOSS was educated at Trinity College and Yale University. He is a private art dealer specializing in Italian and Spanish old masters, as well as the publisher and editor of The Sheep Meadow Press, a non-profit press devoted to poetry.