Asleep in the Garden

""In writing, he moved from the word I,/ the word once a serpent curled between the rocks,/ to he, the word once a hawk drifting above the reeds,/ back to us: a nest of serpents."" Carving out a complex identity, as a writer, Jew, mortal and fault-ridden, struggling David, Moss's best work has always drawn on his gifts as an anguished psalmist. Many of the 25 or so new poems in this new and selected fourth collection try to find an everyday language for less-than-divine forms of knowing: ""I speak of prayer, it is not prayer./ I count syllables like minutes before sunset..../ Old enough, I have learned to be my own child: I carry myself on my shoulders, whipping and laughing."" In ""Lost Daughter,"" another new poem, Moss wrestles grimly with himself as well as with his God: ""I have protected the flame of a match/ I lit and then discarded/ more than I cared for you."" Studded with classical allusions and acerbic historical musings (""The park benches, of course, are ex-Nazis/ They supported the ass of the SS"" Moss writes of Munich), this collection reveals a poet who must inhabit what he learns--often painfully--about love and faith, and who refuses to let us, or himself, off the hook. (Dec.) FYI: Moss is the publisher and editor of the nonprofit Sheep Meadow Press.