Stanley Moss

Stanley Moss was educated at Trinity College (Connecticut) and Yale University and makes his living as a private art dealer, specializing in Spanish and Italian Old Masters. As a child he visited Europe with his family, and after serving in World War II he taught English in Barcelona and Rome, where he became familiar with the religious and mythical figures that appear in his work.

He is the critically acclaimed author of The Skull of Adam (1979), The Intelligence of Clouds (1989), Asleep in the Garden (1997), A History of Color (2003), New and Selected Poems (2006), Rejoicing (2009), God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike (2011), Almost Complete Poems (2016), and Abandoned Poems (2018). Poet and critic Hayden Carruth has been quoted as saying, “The poetry of the ages is an argument with God, but few poets have picked up that argument in recent years. Stanley Moss does.” Noted critic Christopher Buckley, in The American Poetry Review, adds “The strength of Moss’s poems lies in the fact that he can continue the argument and keep it immediate to our lives, where we are at the end of all this time in relation to God, myth, skepticism, the unreviseable facts of death on an individual and large scale.” Moss’s psalms are provocative, almost gothic, in their attention to the body, and refreshingly intimate in their address of the mythical and holy.

In 1977 Moss founded Sheep Meadow Press, a nonprofit press devoted to poetry, with a particular focus on international poets in translation. He lives in New York.