Stanley Moss was born in Woodhaven, New York. He was educated at Trinity College and Yale University, and he served in the US Navy during World War II. After the war he worked at Botteghe Oscure and taught English in Rome and Barcelona. His first book of poems, The Wrong Angel, was published in 1966, and since then he has also published The Skull of Adam (1979), The Intelligence of Clouds (1989), Asleep in the Garden (1997), A History of Color (2003), Songs of Imperfection (2005), New and Selected Poems (2006), Rejoicing (2009), No Tear is Commonplace (2013), It's About Time (2015), Abandoned Poems (2017) and Almost Complete Poems (2017). He is translated into German by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, into Chinese by Fu Hao, and into Spanish by Valerie Mejer.
Moss worked as an editor at New Directions, New American Library, Bookweek, New York Herald Tribune and New American Review. In 1977, he founded Sheep Meadow Press, a non-profit publishing company that publishes poetry and belles lettres. He makes his living as a private art dealer, largely in Spanish and Italian Old Masters. He lives in Clinton Corners, New York.
Praise for Stanley Moss
'Magisterial... God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike is magnificent. I've read it several times with greater and greater pleasure. Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanity, the quality and quantity of information which it integrates into poetry of the highest order make it a continuing delight.'
Marilyn Hacker
''Death is a many-colored harlequin', asserts Stanley Moss on his 92nd birthday. Undaunted, outrageously alive, Moss in these poems flaunts more colors than the Grim Reaper ever dreamed of, laughs in his face, rhymes with abandon, makes a joyful noise unto the Lord, and struts with Baudelaire. This is a book to hold onto for dear life.'
Rosanna Warren
'Moss is oceanic: his poems rise, crest, and rise again like crashing waves. His voice echoes the boom of the Old Testament, the fluty trill of Greek mythology, and the gongs of Chinese rituals as he writes about love, nature, war, oppression, and the miracle of language.'
Donna Seaman, Booklist
'Open a book of Stanley Moss anywhere, and you will come shockingly upon wisdom and beauty, a diversity of styles â a unity of voice, a voice that was there since the beginning. I love Stanley Mossâs work... Of the generation that is gradually leaving us, those born in the mid and late 1920s, he has a prominent place. He loves donkeys. He owns Ted Roethkeâs raccoon coat. He is an original.'
Gerald Stern
'Moss is the kind of poet who tries to find words that help us live, that tell us directly how to laugh down folly or take courage.'
New York Times reviews US edition of Almost Complete Poems
'Unthinkable questions [...], but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight.'
John Ashbery
'It is time to celebrate the singular beauty and power of Stanley Mossâs poetry⦠The damp genius of mortality presides.'
Stanley Kunitz
'Again and again, coming upon a poem of Stanley Mossâs, I have had the feeling of being taken by surprise. Not simply by the eloquence or the direct authenticity of the language, for I had come to expect those in his poems. The surprise arose from the nature of his poetry itself, and from the mystery that his poems confront and embody, which makes them both intense and memorable.'
W.S. Merwin
'This is a book made of experience and high intellect. ... these poems curse and sing about the blessings and tragedies of personal life ... an important, gutsy collection.'
Yusef Komunyakaa
'I've loved Stanley's poems since I first encountered a poem of his in Poetry magazine in John Berrymanâs office when I was nineteen.'
W. S. Merwin
'Unthinkable questions, but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight.'
John Ashbery
