Dead Animals Society
Laurie Smith reviews Asleep in the Garden - New and Selected Poems by Stanley Moss [Anvil £9.95].
Stanley Moss, now in his seventies, published his first collection at 44. Some of the earliest poems in this ample selection refer to childhood experiences forty years previously so, somewhat unusually, he is a poet who did not write poetry in his younger years (or did not preserve any) and appears, fully developed, in his forties. There are no novice pieces here nor any experimental ones; the style is consistent throughout.
Moss is an American who grew up and has apparently lived most of his life in New York City or State. From his poems, he has travelled widely in Europe and elsewhere. He is a non-practising Jew with a distant, ambivalent view of Judaism. Religion is a muted presence in poems about his father (The Inheritance, Two Fishermen) which are centred, rather, on fishing. It gives rise to anger in poems about visits to scenes of Second World War pogroms:
I know in the city someone wears the good gold
watch
given to him by a mother to save her infant
thrown in a sewer. Someone still tells the time by
that watch.
(A Visit to Kaunas)The park benches, of course, are ex-Nazis.
They supported the ass of the SS
without questioning; the old stamp Juden Verboten
has been painted out.
(The Public Gardens of Munich)
The only poem that deals directly with the Holocaust is, with Moss’s longest title by far, A Sketch of Slaves, Jews in Concentration Camps and Unhappy Lovers. In fact, the slaves and lovers appear very briefly. The poem is about the camps:
the useless are directed by a finger
to the right, the useful to the left -
examined naked…
The reason for the distractions of the title becomes apparent at the end:
A few climb for air
on the bodies of others, dig their fingernails
into the plaster ceiling, trying to escape
the suffocation. I thumb through the naked corpses
for my hidden life.
Bravely, though with some embarrassment, the poem faces the oppressiveness of the Holocaust for a Jew for whom it is emotionally distant. The corpses are no more than images that are “thumbed through” in the hope that some new perception may stir. This feeling of distance also informs I Have Come to Jerusalem in which the poet meets his maternal grandmother for the first time since childhood. The meeting is described in ten flat lines and the poem veers swiftly off into the poet’s childhood memories of her house.
Moss is capable of sentimentality towards Judaism and in his clearer moments is honest about this:
I catch myself almost praying,
for the first time in my life,
to a God I treat like a nettle
on my trouser cuff.
(Jerusalem, Easter)
He is also well versed in Christian ritual, but it means no more to him than words from which he can pick and choose:
Yesterday at five o’clock I heard the rosary
up to the “joys and sorrows” of the Virgin, had coffee,
then returned for the litany...
(Postcard to Waft Whitman from Siena)
In Dog, he shows his knowledge of Christian prayers and, in a striking modernisation of the ancient abusive image of Jew-as-dog, writes:
Trying to convert me would be like trying to teach a
dog to drive a car
just because it likes to go out for a drive.
Despite this fundamental disbelief in religion in any literal sense, God nevertheless appears in many of Moss’s poems, often at or near the end to create an effect of emotional closure:
What a relief to see someone repair
an old frying pan with a hammer,
anvil and charcoal fire, a utensil worth keeping.
God, why not keep us? Make me useful.
(Jerusalem, Easter)I am not sure that the hand of God
and the hand of man or woman ever touch,
even by chance.
(The Valley)
As Moss does not believe in God, these are not statements about the deity. Rather, they are images designed for a particular effect on the reader. They indicate an unfocussed seriousness which, because it is unfocussed, cannot be rendered clearly. Moss therefore draws on imagery which is vague but unchallengeable. It is never made clear what being “kept” by a non-existent God or “the hand” of a non-existent God means, so these phrases work by evoking any religious feeling that the reader may have. Language which seeks to create feeling rather than convey meaning is rhetorical and, indeed, Moss’s poems proceed by free-floating rhetoric. They do not normally seek to tell a story, create a mood or establish a view of experience - all common aims of poetry. Rather, they lead wherever the next fine-sounding phrase or image leads. Most of Moss’s work embodies Yeats’s comment about rhetoric being the will doing the work of the imagination.
This impulse informs portentous meditations such as Letter to the Butterflies and The Lace Makers, also long accounts of unnamed people who may be alternative versions of the self (Fool, The Geographer, The Gift, Walking). It also accounts for sudden changes of tone. The Miscarriage is a gently moving poem addressed to the child who was never born. The miscarriage seems to have happened in Florence and mention of “looking at pictures of the Virgin” sends Moss off into a rollicking fantasy:
What if the Virgin Mother miscarried? What if
the Magi arrived with all that myrrh and frankincense
like dinner guests on the wrong evening.
Our Lady embarrassed, straightening up,
Joseph offering them chairs he made and a little
wine.
The rhetorical impulse also accounts for Moss’s fondness for writing poems in two parts which do not cohere. In Rainbows and Circumcision (both of which, a note tells us, are Biblical signs of the Jewish covenant), the first part establishes the signs, rather beautifully, from a Jewish perspective:
Rainbow and mother, tell me who I am!
We might have used another sign,
a red dot on the forehead or a scar on the cheek,
to show the world who we are,
but our sign is intimate, for ourselves
and those who see us naked - like poetry.
The second half recalls seeing a double rainbow above the classical ruins of Rome:
To see all that at the same time, and two rainbows,
was a pagan and religious thing: holy,
it was like the thunderous beauty of a psalm, and like
peeking through the keyhole with the masturbating
slaves,
watching Hector mounted on Andromache. O
rainbows!
I find it impossible to derive any meaning from the poem as a whole, apart from the banal one that rainbows can have different associations at different times. Moss has been led from one to the other by the desire for momentary effect, not the impulse to create a meaningful poem. The same desire appears in Stowaway where death is beautifully rendered as a vision of the poet wearing his old felt hat as he drowns and becomes transformed by the sea. But this is preceded by Part 1 which consists mainly of:
Once I entered down the centre aisle
at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus
on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me.
“Who is this master of her ninety nipples?”
the public whispered.
One struggles to connect the two parts - the sea as symbol of excessive sexuality? death as the end of sexual vanity? - but nothing makes emotional sense and, indeed, Moss provides the lamest of connections: “Now the ocean is my audience”. (Taking Rainbows and Circumcision and Stowaway together, a possible link is that, like repressed British scholars of the 19th century, Moss finds classical myth liberatingly sexy.)
The same hit-and-miss approach to image and meaning appears in Moss’s most persistent imagery: violence to the self and to animals. It can appear as literal, like the fish hooks caught in the poet’s hand in Two Fishermen and as symbolic as in Vomit, an extended meditation from the same image:
The stomach and the heart can be tom
out through the mouth if you get the right hook.
Sometimes the inner violence is overt:
I carry within
a man whose wife was raped, a murdered friend.
(Ruse)
but more often it is imaged as violence to an animal. This may occupy a whole poem, as in Daydream where the poet writes of shooting a bear and leaving her cubs to starve, and The Meeting where he finds a swan, apparently hit by a car, rolling in the road. Unlike poems by other writers, like Stafford’s Travelling through the Dark or Plath’s Blue Moles (and, indeed, Baudelaire’s Le Cygne), the creature is not described in a way that makes it real; rather, it is an image only and we are to understand that it is an image of inner disturbance. Such images can take existing ones and make them more grotesque, as in Black Dog (“I fly the flag of the menstruating black dog / a black dog dripping blood over us all”); not merely Dr Johnson’s black dog of depression, but a menstruating one. Such images can appear suddenly in poems about other things, such as In Front of a Poster of Garibaldi, a warm and mostly relaxed poem for Moss’s Italian son:
Not every poet bites into his own jugular,
some hunger, some observe the intelligence of
clouds.
I was surprised to see a heart come out
of the torn throat of a snake.
And in Poem before Marriage, written before Moss’s marriage to Jane, he images himself as a creature - “part man, part seagull, part turtle”:
I have already been picked out of the mud three times and thrown
against apartment house walls, left for dead.
In Moss’s longest meditation on guilt, Apoctypha (from which the title of this collection is taken), there is a plethora of dead creatures:
I painted over the diseased apple tree,
I buried the available dead around it:
thirty trout that died in the pond
when I tried to kill the algae, a run-over raccoon,
a hive of maggots in every hole.
This seems promising at last (“This year the tree flowered, bears fruit”), but the emotional centre of the poem (“I chose abortion in place of a son”) is passed over instantly and Moss retreats into apocalyptic imagery:
I fall asleep in the garden,
I am blinded by the droppings
of a hummingbird or crow.
There is a dark violence at the heart of Moss’s work to which he returns again and again, but which he never illuminates. It seems to arise from anger and guilt, but their causes are never probed. I have the feeling that Moss endlessly pursues rhetorical devices to enable him simultaneously to continue writing and to avoid confronting what is most central to him.
This said, there are at least six poems in which rhetoric is eschewed and the feeling comes over clear and true. They are all elegies, which is perhaps the genre in which Moss’s temperament is under least strain. They are the three poems about his father (two mentioned above and Old Fisherman); New York Song which images awareness of death and loss of a friend as pigeons on the wreckage of two Times Square theatres; For James Wright in which the death of a fellow writer is presaged and celebrated in a image of great subtlety and richness:
I kiss your hand and head, then I walk out on you
past the fields of the sick and dying
like a tourist in Monet’s garden.
And, finally, Sign on the Road, Moss’s own valediction in which, for the first and only time, he names himself:
The apple falls like an apple, and leaves
Hit the earth in their leafy way, and Moss
Shall be no exception. One fine day
I shall fall down like myself in a prison of anger.
The most touching thing about this is Moss’s final acceptance that, for all his learning, intelligence and skill, he has never escaped the “prison of anger”.
Page(s) 28-34
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