• From the Publisher
December 22, 2016

Moss is ocean­ic: his poems rise, crest, crash, and rise again like waves. His voice echoes the boom of the Old Tes­ta­ment, the flu­ty trill of Greek mythol­o­gy, and the gongs of Chi­nese rit­u­als as he writes about love, nature, war, oppres­sion, and the mir­a­cle of lan­guage. He address­es the God of the Jews, of the Chris­tians, and of the Mus­lims with awe and famil­iar­i­ty, and chants to less­er gods of his own inven­tion. In every sur­pris­ing poem, every song to life, beau­ti­ful life, Moss, by turns gid­dy and sor­row­ful, express­es a sacred sen­su­al­i­ty and an earthy holi­ness. Or putting it anoth­er way: here is a mind oper­at­ing in open air, unim­ped­ed by fash­ion or forced the­mat­ic focus, pro­found­ly catholic in per­spec­tive, at once acces­si­ble and eru­dite, inevitably com­pelling. All of which is to rec­om­mend Moss’s abil­i­ty to par­tic­i­pate in and con­trol thor­ough­ly these poems while resist­ing the impulse to cen­ter him­self in them. This dif­fer­en­ti­ates his beau­ti­ful work from much con­tem­po­rary breast-beat­ing. Moss is an artist who embraces the pos­si­bil­i­ties of exul­ta­tion, appre­ci­a­tion, rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, of extreme ten­der­ness. As such he lays down a com­mit­ment to a com­mon, world­ly moral­i­ty toward which all beings gravitate

Discussion Questions