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No Tear is Commonplace

Stanley Moss

Cover of No Tear is Commonplace by Stanley Moss
Categories: 21st Century, American
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (80 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2013)
9781847772503
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Reviews
  • Old Fool, I have no desire for the afterlife.
    I want to stay here with You, to hang around
    with Your trees, Your animals and my wife.

    from ‘Why’
    The poems collected in No Tear is Commonplace stage a passionate, curious, and often combative relationship with the world and the forces that shape human life and death. Stanley Moss’s range is wide: his poetry recalls the ‘Adirondack wilderness’ of childhood summers, imagines a young Christ learning carpentry, reflects on the tragedies of twentieth-century Europe. What shines through is the poet’s commitment to the fullness of human experience in the here-and-now.
    Sunrise – Morning
    Paper Swallow 
    Nightingale 
    Tell Me Pretty Maiden 
    No Tear is Commonplace 
    Why 
    What 
    Parable of the Porcupine 
    Capriccio 
    History 
    Sand 
    To a Stranger 
    Bright Day 
    That Morning 

    12 Noon
    Chorus 
    The Man Tree 
    The American Dream 
    Revenge Comedy 
    Letter to a Fish 
    The Fish Answers 
    December 8 
    Please 
    Drinking Song 
    Smiles 
    Granite 
    Alexander Fu Musing / China Song 
    Elegy for the Poet Reetika Vazirani and her Child 
    On William Blake’s Drawing, ‘The Ghost of a Flea’ 
    A Glance at Turner 
    Requiem 
    Dogs 
    Munich 2010 
    For Georgie 

    Sunset – Night
    Poem 
    Anatomy Lessons 
    February 
    Listening to Water 
    And there are African Links/Licks in Every Language 
    Letter to Dannie Abse 
    The Hudson River 
    Down River 
    The Grammarian 
    Affluent Reader 
    Space Poem 
    Onlyness 
    Eye 
    Backstage 
    For Uncle Lem 
    Signifier 
    Silent Poem 
    The Carpenter 
    Squeezing the Lemon 
    Pollen 
    Psalm 

    Index of Titles and First Lines 
    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
    '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
    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
    '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 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
    '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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