Winters Come, Summers Gone: Selected Poems

by Howard Moss, J. D. McClatchy (Editor)

Overview

“What has been overlooked for too many years now is an achievement of extraordinary proportions. Howard Moss’s career unfolded in surprising ways. In eleven books over forty years, he transformed the urbane but astringent lyricism of his early work into a style more refined, darkened, and humane.  Without sacrificing the wit and rhythmic finesse that marked his poetry from the start, he came to write with a more searching complexity or with a more startling simplicity, as his subject demanded. Everywhere his poems speak eloquently of the wounds of experience, the weather of the spirit. The distance between dream and mind, or between survivor and ghost, the longing of settled habit for unsettling doubts, or of love for dissolution—these are the precarious states he charted with an uncanny accuracy. Trace these margins yourselves in the pages of this book, and discover a lone figure walking into the horizon, into a place among the permanent American poets.” —J. D. McClatchy, from the Introduction

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937679651
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Howard Moss was a poet, a critic, and the poetry editor of The New Yorker for nearly forty years. He wrote fourteen books of poetry and won the National Book Award in 1972. He died in 1987.

Table of Contents

Introduction J. D. McClatchy vii

from The Wound and the Weather (1946)

The Fox Hunt 3

A Wreath for Wednesday 5

Theater Cliff 6

The Window 7

from The Toy Fair (1954)

A Street with Children 11

Burning Love Letters 12

Elegy for my Father 14

Mountain and Clouds 15

Animal Hospital 16

Elizabethan Tragedy: A Footnote 18

Venice 19

from A Swimmer in the Air (1957)

A Summer Gone 23

The Falls of Love 26

Horror Movie 28

Small Elegy 30

Letter to an Imaginary Brazil 31

Boiling Eggs 33

A Winter Come 35

from A Winter Come, A Summer Gone, Poems 1946 - 1960 (1960)

The Dumb Show 41

Tourists 43

King Midas 44

The Truth About Love 51

Pine 53

from Finding Them Lost (1965)

Water Island 57

The Pruned Tree 59

A Swim off the Rocks 60

After the Flood 61

Sea Change 62

Going to Sleep in the Country 63

The Breakwater 65

Crossing the Park 66

Robinson 68

September Elegy 70

Finding Them Lost 73

The Cemetery by the Sea: A Translation of Le Cimitière Marin Paul Valéry 75

from Second Nature (1968)

Piano Practice 83

Great Spaces 86

At the Algonquin 87

The Vase 88

Arsenic 89

Going Dutch 92

Drinks with X 94

The Wars 96

A Dead Leaf 97

from Selected Poems (1971)

Ménage à Trois 101

Long Island Springs 103

from Buried City (1975)

Chekhov 109

Tattoo 112

Tropical Fish 113

At the Masseur's 114

Anemones 118

Nearing the Lights 119

Buried City 120

from A Swim Off the Rocks: Light Verse (1976)

Rye, In Winter 127

A Song Struck from the Records 128

Proust at the Ritz 129

Modified Sonnets 130

Short Stories 132

On the Difficult of Obtaining Potions 136

Charm 137

from Notes from the Castle (1979)

Gravel 141

Notes from the Castle 146

Have You Forgotten 148

Elegy for My Sister 149

Listening to Jazz on a Summer Terrace 153

Rilke's Childhood 154

Stars 155

from Rules of Sleep (1984)

In Umbria 163

The Gallery Walk: Art and Nature 166

The Restaurant Window 168

Rooftop 170

Miami Beach 172

Rules of Sleep 174

No Harm 175

The Miles Between 176

Song from the Intensive Care Unit 177

Making a Bed 178

Morning Glory 179

Einstein's Bathrobe 180

Uncollected Poems

By the Stream 185

Social Climbing 186

Going Under 188

Missing Person 190

The Moon 196

Cardinal 197

Psychoanalysis 198

Conclusion 199

Selected Bibliography 201

Index of Titles and First Lines 203

A Note About J. D. McClatchy 208