"Stanley Moss’s tremendous My Sporting Life, written in his 96th and 97th years, is a Book of Being, bringing wholly into action, as Moss has for over seventy years, the fullness of the time in which we commonly live. Moss’s poems are dazzling and brash, gentle and playful, open and generous, fiercely sharp in their moral witness, unlimited in their virtuosic, musical range and skill. ‘I am grateful for the miracle of you and I being alive,” the poet sings, a faithful lover of the deeply good. In his “Elegy for Me,” the poet proudly says, ‘He made God laugh.’ Stanley Moss makes God laugh. Only the best are capable of that."—Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems
"Stanley Moss’s My Sporting Life is spry as ever, and the imagery and turns are right on, visionary and timely. Whether it is historical or philosophical, a dog or a god, each poem shows the reader how the past informs the present. Time in My Sporting Life is pure realism. And the speaker is having fun. Not for mere laughter, but for resounding truth, another brave rendering—a poet’s journey—into the future."—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of the Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"Ever since Whitman, America has now and again produced a poet who can celebrate the abundance of life with joy and inquisitive detail, laying his soul out naked on the page. Moss is one of these. He is moving, surprising and funny, with a relaxed free style that can catch you off guard and tell you things that you didn’t know you half-knew. The new book is full of this infectious eagerness to catch things before they go, in a spirit of “not yet” that is not only a beautiful defiance but a kind of mysticism of the bodily life, an ambition to redeem the world before he is required to leave it."—John Fuller, author of The Space of Joy
About the Author
Stanley Moss is the author of several poetry collections, including The Skull of Adam, A History of Color, and Abandoned Poems. He is the founder of Sheep Meadow Press, a non profit publisher devoted to poetry with a particular focus on international poets in translation. He lives in New York.
June 2023