Long admired for his stewardship of Sheep Meadow Press, Moss has also earned acclaim for his own lyrical work, whose long-lined eloquence mixes autobiographical reflections, tributes to friends and places, and a temperate, self-assured humor. Though Moss's last volume, The History of Color
(2003), was also a new-and-selected, this slightly slimmer gathering holds enough new poems to merit a look of its own: advancing years, the death of friends (especially eminent poets, such as Stanley Kunitz), Jewish history and Jewish liturgy provide recurrent themes for Moss's latest works, with which the volume (mostly) opens. (Moss's perhaps confusing arrangement offers new work first, the oldest last, "with exceptions" so he can group poems with similar subjects.) There are travels overseas—to Jerusalem and Israel, in particular, but also to Italy, China, Germany—and voyages backward in time, as Moss reanimates Ovidian themes. His best poems, however, are less about ethnic or religious heritage than about crafts and arts undervalued in their own time: "The Lace Makers," for example, and the new "An American Hero," which tells the startling story of James Hewlett, who "joined a Shakespeare theater of ex-slaves." (Oct.)
