Editorial
It is impossible not to dedicate this editorial to Stanley Moss. His impact on PN Review was decisive, if oblique: for over three decades he was a contributor, adviser and friend. His death at the early age of ninety-nine is a source of sadness and a cause for celebration. My first letter (it was a real letter, typed and tucked into an envelope with enclosures, licked, stamped and posted in the little red letterbox in South Hinksey) to Mr and Mrs Moss, was sent on 20 September 1969, fifty-five years ago almost to the day. We had invited Stanley to read at Oxford to a tiny, out-of-term audience. My letter promised him a proper tour of the city and a larger congregation on his next visit and announced to him that we were starting a small publishing operation out of the ashes of the magazine Carcanet, forerunner of this journal. I also threatened to look him and his wife up in New York when I visited later in the year ‘either in quest of a job or merely for recreation’. Half a centur y and half a decade later, with the greatest reluctance, he shuffled off his mortal coil on 5 July 2024.
He became our author when Anvil Press joined ranks with Carcanet Press. Long before, he had befriended the magazine and its editor. He had advocated key poets on our European writers’ list (he was translated by Enzensberger and Amichai among others). Latterly, our almost daily exchanges, by phone and then by email, and his enormously prolific later output of poems meant that I became a permanent guest in his sensuous and spiritual imagination. Ever y day brought a new surprise, each meal he ser ved had untested courses, some delicious and some rebarbative. No two dishes were ever the same. My occasional complaints were with his syntax, his sporadic doggerelish rhymes, and sometimes with enjambments, line and stanza breaks. He listened when it suited him. He was himself a formidable, enabling editor when he took the time. (He had cut his teeth on the legendar y Botteghe Oscure, then at Book week, New York Herald Tribune and New American Review; he worked as an editor with James Laughlin at New Directions in New York and then set up his own publishing house, Sheep Meadow Press.) My last book of poems was inevitably entitled Talking to Stanley on the Telephone.
In recent years we exchanged (according to my computer) well over 2000 emails. Some are long, full of anecdotes and arguments. Often he would complete a poem and then follow on with three or four revisions: these sequences are editorially fascinating. He was profligate in discarding memorable lines, heaping up darlings like Herod’s babies. He usually knew when a poem, whether his own or those of his authors, was finished.
At first he was just a transatlantic friend – I saw him in the United States, he saw me in Manchester – but because we were both editors and publishers we had much in common. His friendship with many poets I loved, including Auden, Dylan Thomas and Robert Lowell, meant that he was an inexhaustible source of lived (and from time to time embroidered) histor y. He remembered certain things too clearly, as though he had refined them in the retelling. I believed ever ything he told me. His ‘Diar y of a Satyr’ (PNR 189) remains the best introduction to the spirit of the man, and much or most of it is rooted in fact, despite the imaginar y frame.
Carol Rumens in the Guardian referred to him as a ‘religious poet’, with the difference being that his God, Who is certainly there, never acknowledges Himself or his subject. The frustration this induces is unquenchable in the poems as it was in the life. He was first mentioned in PNR in a review by Sarah Matthews in 1981.
He moves, baffled, between an organic world which is in on the secret, and a spiritual world whose secret is just out of reach. His poems, fluidly structured, but with images of force and substance (‘… I jump into the desert, / a big Jew, the law under my arm like bread.’), reflect his unease.
