NEW YORK, NY.- Stanley Moss, a lyrical American poet who for seven decades evoked a troubled world of sorrows and sensual pleasures ruled by a silent God seemingly indifferent to the fate of humanity, died Friday in New City, New York, in Rockland County. He was 99.
His death, at a rehabilitation and nursing center, was announced by his son, Tobia Milla Moss.
In the notoriously hard business of poetry, Moss sold his work to periodicals for 20 years before his first collection, “The Wrong Angel,” was published in 1966, when he was 41. He eventually published 16 books of collected poetry, ending with “Always Alwaysland,” published on his 97th birthday in 2022.
Even after he was noticed, it was a struggle. At 52, he founded a poetry publishing company in New York. It barely covered his expenses.
But by then, an old connection had come to his rescue. In 1969, he befriended the heirs of an Italian nobleman who after his death had left a trove of Spanish and Italian old master paintings. Starting as an agent for the nobleman’s heirs, Moss began selling art to the Louvre, the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty and other major museums. As a result, he became prosperous enough to finance his life as a poet.
“When I started selling art, I had no money or training,” he told Dylan Foley in 2005 for a blog called The Last Bohemians. “I have a gift for finding old masters. I have discovered pictures that now hang in the Louvre that I bought for nothing. It takes taste and brains.
“How do I balance my careers as a poet and a dealer? I have the advantage of not having to sleep much.”
Moss was not nationally known. But he won thousands of devoted fans with what critics called exquisite, moving and often painful free-verse observations on the natural world, friends’ deaths, the Holocaust and other topics. Many of his books were translated into German, Spanish, Italian or Chinese, and readers were drawn to his confrontations with a God he deemed oblivious of mankind. In “Winter Flowers,” from “Almost Complete Poems” (2016), he wrote:
Once my friends and I went out in deep paradise snow
With Saint Bernards and Great Pyrenees
To find those lost in the blizzard that God made for Himself
Because He prefers not seeing what happens on earth.
“Moss may or may not be accurately termed a religious poet,” British poet Carol Rumens wrote in The Guardian in 2015. “If he’s a religious poet, he’s one of the too-few irreligious kind, firmly of this world in his vivid pleasures and sorrows, joyfully harrying God from myth to unsatisfactory myth, denomination to denomination, fascinated by the whole subject of deity but hardly expecting a catch or kill.”
In “A History of Color: New and Collected Poems” (2003), which covered four decades of his work in settings including Beijing, New York, ancient Greece, modern Italy and the Jerusalem of Arabs and Jews, Moss posed challenges to God in response to the deadly terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In his poem “Creed,” included in that collection, he wrote:
I do not believe the spirits of the dead
Are closer to God than the living,
Nor do I take to my heart
The Christlike word ubuntu
That teaches reconciliation
Of murderers, torturers, accomplices,
With victims still living.
“In a sense, Moss has been writing the same poem for more than 40 years — elliptical meditations that take the self as a starting point of intellectual autobiography,” J.T. Barbarese wrote in his review of that book in The New York Times. “Moss is constantly talking to the past. Yet the most repeated word in these 250 pages is God, and the fact that Moss’ God is the God of the dis- or the unbeliever suggests that the best religious poetry still comes out of longing rather than conviction.”
In “Almost Complete Poems” (2016), Moss reflected on decades of his poetic gifts. “They are real,” Stephen Burt wrote in the Times, “and they reflect his life and talents — his quest for spiritual strength, his Jewish heritage, his eye on Europe and European art, and his 91 years.”
Stanley Moss was born Stanley David Moskowitz in New York City on June 21, 1925, to Samuel and Margaret (Grubin) Moskowitz, a Jewish couple who hosted occasional seders, but who rarely took Stanley and his older sister, Lillian, to synagogue services. Their mother managed the household; their father, an immigrant from Lithuania, was the principal of Eastern District High School in Brooklyn and later of Bayside High in Queens. He changed the family name to Moss in 1939.
With Samuel Moss on sabbatical in 1935, the family crossed the Atlantic and cruised the Mediterranean on the Dutch liner Statendam, calling at Spain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine and Algeria. Stanley Moss saw the Basilica San Marco in Venice, rode a camel beside the Sphinx, watched men pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and visited the Santa Sophia cathedral and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.
At Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, Moss was a brilliant but erratic student. He wrote poems and columns for a student newspaper, but he also cut classes often.
The Moss dinner table was a nightly battleground. “In our family, the beginning of civilization was understood to be the moment Abraham sacrificed the ram instead of his firstborn son,” Moss recalled in an essay, “Satyr Song.” “I started one dinner’s conversation with, ‘I think it would have been better to kill Isaac than the ram. I think the ram stands for me. Daddy, you know there’s a very thin line between the good shepherd and the butcher.’”
“Who are you to think?” his father roared as he whacked Stanley with a ruler. “My mother,” Moss recalled, “threatened to stab herself with a kitchen knife like a bronze Lucretia.”
At 17, after calling his father a sadist, Moss was briefly banished from home. But with his parents’ permission, he enlisted in the wartime Navy in 1942.
On active duty in 1943, he sustained a severe leg injury. After convalescing, he was sent to Trinity College in Connecticut to join the Navy’s V-12 training program for potential officers.
He took academic courses for two semesters, but he did not complete the training and was discharged in March 1944 with a disability pension. He then attended classes in the drama department of the Yale University School of Fine Arts from 1945 to 1946.
Moss acknowledged in an interview and an exchange of emails for this obituary that despite what his Who’s Who entry claimed, he did not earn a bachelor’s degree from Trinity or a master’s degree from Yale.
In 1948, he became an editor at New Directions, a Manhattan book publisher. He was later a drinking friend of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
Moss and Ana Maria Vandellos, a former Barnard College student from Spain’s Catalonia region, were married in 1953. They lived in Barcelona, Spain, and were divorced in 1960. In 1967, he married Jane Zech, a Columbia University teacher.
In addition to his son, Moss is survived by his wife and two granddaughters.
Moss, who spoke Italian and Spanish, lived in Rome in the 1960s and early ’70s. He was a contributing editor for the Rome literary journal Botteghe Oscure and taught English in Rome and Barcelona. In New York in 1977, he founded Sheep Meadow Press, which published poetry books by Hayden Carruth, Stanley Kunitz, Stephen Berg and others.
In 1978, the Times reported that Moss had sold old masters to the Louvre, the Prado and other major museums for the heirs of Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi, who died in 1955 leaving 150 valuable artworks, and that Moss had since become “an important factor — an ‘éminence grise,’ in the words of one good judge — in the old masters market.”
Moss often gave poetry readings and lectures at colleges and universities. He had a home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and a hobby farm in Clinton Corners, in Dutchess County. His books included “The Skull of Adam” (1979), “The Intelligence of Clouds” (1989), “Songs of Imperfection” (2004), “God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike” (2011), “It’s About Time” (2015), “Abandoned Poems” (2018), “Act V, Scene I” (2020) and “Not Yet” (2021).
Moss sometimes called himself “Goya’s child,” and he dedicated a poem to Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, the Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, known as the last of the old masters.
That poem, “Paper Swallow” (2014), which first appeared in The New Yorker, scorned its own author as a marrano, a Jew who falsely professed Christianity to escape persecution:
Don Francisco, I swear at the feet of the dead who maim me
And the living who heal me that the least sound,
A page turning, whips me. I owe my blindness,
This paper swallow, to you, because I lived
Most of my life, a marrano, in your deaf house.
I pull open one of my eyes like the jaws of a beast.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
