Arrivals and Departures: Poems by Stewart Moss

Stewart Moss’s Arrivals & Departures is a book of longing—to stay, to hold, to witness—even though he is sometimes just a boy, who could not know the wisdom of later years, in “rapt attention/ to the motes drifting and spinning / in shafts of light,” we raise our faces with him to that often inevitable experience of growing up and see the “star shaped frames and out / into the rushing world beyond.” That world filled with wonder is delivered to us in Moss’s beautiful language “precise as chisels then silent as a finished stone.” It is a place where the “cyclone that had gathered all the breaths /we mortals have blown out from our own bodies,” storms our slumber. We are travelers with Moss, “in the endless afterlife of breath…clouds declaring their freedom.” Moss is a master poet, and this collection will sit on my shelf beside Stanley Kunitz, Jane Hirshfield and Jack Gilbert.

–Leeya Mehta, A Story of the World Before the Fence

In Arrivals and Departures, Stewart Moss takes us on a poetic trek from Ireland to Nepal, from Afghanistan to Kenya, from Virginia to California, from Long Island to Paris to Kathmandu. Yet, while sharing the world with us, every poem in this marvelous book never lets us forget the affect and value of private experience. For within the context of traveling the world, Moss brilliantly examines the external and internal landscapes of human life. On one hand he observes, “The earth recalls the secret music,” and on the other he says, “There is something more awful / in happiness than in sorrow.” These are poems of self-examination in the best sense, of the recognition that “Ours is a life of small instruments” used in the direct experience of everyday living. “All good art is experience,” W. B Yeats once observed, “all popular bad art generalization.” By this definition, Arrivals and Departures succeeds by chronicling, depicting, and examining a deeply felt life in verse that is by turns tender and traumatic, from the wonder of holding and feeling one’s daughter breathe to the psychological cost of conflict. As Moss writes, “I want to kneel and ask questions.” After reading these poems, like his character Arlene, we are left feeling “fleshless in water, / light as bones.”

V. P. Loggins, The Wild Severance

In Arrivals and Departures, Stewart Moss roams the world and sends dispatches from the human heart. Whether he is meditating upon the taste of an oyster “slippery with brine” or offering a sly commentary on the morning commute, Moss brings to these poems a reverence as well as a sharp, observant eye. “In this world of arrivals and departures / does anything remain?” the title poem asks. I would argue that these poems, with their soaring flights of intellect and graceful landings on the page, provide an answer.

–Sue Ellen Thompson, Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems, 2010 Maryland Author Award