It's About Time

Stanley Moss dedicates these poems 'to departed friends: human, canine, arboreal, avian', setting the tone for a collection that is celebratory, occasional, salutatory. Striking out at 'Sunrise', the poems move through sections for 'Noon', 'Sunset', and 'Eclipse'. As light turns to shade, and shade to darkness, the viewpoint matures, grows deliberative, more aware of a pressing mortality. History, religion and cosmology proffer their solaces; death and grief are redeemed as tradition or rite, acts of god or fate. Ultimately it is the will to think, to remember, and to memorialise that offer solid foundations: 'It took time before I took my time', writes the poet. Moss creates a wonderfully peopled and cultivated world - one that is wild, giving, ephemeral.'Unthinkable questions, but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight.' - John Ashbery'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'God may or may not be his co-pilot, but Moss has a knack for lifting my spirits into 'the sweaty / life-loving, Book-loving air of happiness'.' - Parnassus'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