Description:
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
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