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God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike

New and Selected Poems 1948-2019

Stanley Moss

Cover of God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike by Stanley Moss
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Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, American, Language, War writings
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (394 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2019)
9781784107550
£19.99 £17.99
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(Pub. Jul 2019)
9781784107567
£15.99 £14.39
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  • ‘Death is a many-colored harlequin,’ Stanley Moss affirmed on his ninety-second birthday. Rosanna Warren writes of his latest poems, ‘Undaunted, outrageously alive, Moss 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.’ And dear life is what Moss’s poetry has always been about, asking what John Ashbery called ‘unthinkable questions, but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight.’ Stanley Moss has been part of the American and European scene for seven decades: a defining editor of world poetry, he is a major poet of the generation of Ashbery, Merwin, Wright and Kinnell. This book richly supplements his Almost Complete Poems (Carcanet, 2017) with recovered writings and new-minted poems that address the monsters of the age while celebrating its angels.
    Stanley Moss was born in Woodhaven, New York on 21 June 1925, and died on Friday 5 July in New City, N.Y., at the age of 99. 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 ... read more
    '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
    Praise for Stanley Moss 'Easily and unaffectedly sharing his life, times and knowledge of the culture, history and ancient history of three continents, Moss is good, thought-provoking company'
    William Wootten, The Times Literary Supplement
    'What Moss gives is a small world in which the reader's imagination is allowed to open out and live within the poem.'
    Ian Pople, The High Window
    '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 Moss’s poetry… The damp genius of mortality presides.'
    Stanley Kunitz
    'Again and again, coming upon a poem of Stanley Moss’s, 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 Berryman’s 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
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