Volume 20, Number 20 · December 13, 1973
Very Different Cats
By Robert Mazzocco
Selected Poems
by Howard Moss
Atheneum, 171 pp., $6.95
Three Poems
by John Ashbery
Viking, 118 pp., $3.95 (paper)
About a year and a half ago in The New Yorker, Howard Moss published what is, I think, probably the best poem he has ever written. The poem is called 'Chekhov.' It has all the characteristic virtues of Moss's other poems—and then surpasses those, transmutes them. It has the poet's typical tone of 'tireless, cool, / Calm, and precise lament'; his laconic sense of exhilaration and depletion, coming in cycles, 'a little bit of both: frenzy and resting'; his subtle, rather resentful realization of the 'Oedipal strangulations' buried at the heart of everything, the heart of memory (a number of Moss's poems could really be christened with a simple precept: there's an awful lot of tomorrow in the past, or vice versa); his forlorn appreciation of the aspects of love, if not the aspects of passion, of the limits of life, if not the untowardness of life, of, at times, the sheer indifference of life to life (Moss's weather, usually, is the calm before the storm—the storm that never happens)—above all, and beautifully, 'Chekhov' demonstrates his ability to encapsulate an emotion in an epigram.
Review, 4647 words
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