God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike

'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. 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.