Stanley Moss, a poet and art dealer known for his meditative verses on friendship, God, evil, animals, his Jewish heritage and the incessant march of time, died July 5 at a rehabilitation and nursing center in New City, N.Y. He was 99.
His death was confirmed by poet Greg Miller, one of his literary executors. Mr. Moss suffered a “cardiac event” in recent months, he said, and increasingly had trouble breathing.
Across more than a dozen books of poetry, Mr. Moss turned moments of autobiography into reflections on love, loss and suffering, writing rangy free-verse poems that won the admiration of peers including W.S. Merwin, Stanley Kunitz and Gerald Stern.
He found a home for his pieces in the New Yorker, the New York Times and Britain’s Times Literary Supplement, although wider fame and major literary prizes eluded him. His friend John Ashbery, praising Mr. Moss’s “highly charged, stingingly beautiful lyrics,” once hailed him as “American poetry’s best-kept secret.”
Mr. Moss collected material wherever he went, writing poems about his travels to France, Italy, China and Israel; his homes in the Bronx and in Clinton Corners, N.Y., where he cared for a trio of beloved donkeys; and his friendships with artists and writers, whom he memorialized in poems such as “How I Got Ted Roethke’s Raccoon-Skin Coat.”
Many of his poems were intensely personal, and could be mischievously self-deprecating or painfully self-lacerating. “I have protected the flame of a match/ I lit and then discarded/ more than I cared for you,” he wrote at the start of “Lost Daughter,” about a child he may have fathered long ago. Others were bawdy and irreverent (“I’m a psalmist with a Miss-directed penis,” he declared) or explored his skeptical views on God, whom he treated “like a nettle/ on my trouser cuff.”
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“Moss may or may not be accurately termed a religious poet: if he’s a religious poet, he’s one of the too-few irreligious kind, firmly of this world in his vivid pleasures and sorrows, joyfully harrying God from myth to unsatisfactory myth, denomination to denomination, fascinated by the whole subject of deity, but hardly expecting a catch or kill,” British poet Carol Rumens wrote in the Guardian in 2015.
Although he wrote poems ever since he was a child, Mr. Moss was in his early 40s by the time he published his debut collection, “The Wrong Angel,” in 1966. Eleven years later, he founded a small publishing house, Sheep Meadow Press, putting out books by American poets including Kunitz, Emily Fragos and Hayden Carruth, as well as translated work by Paul Celan, Federico García Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, Yehuda Amichai and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
“Being involved with writers of different cultural backgrounds, nationalities, invigorated him,” said Miller, who worked with Mr. Moss as an editor at the press. “He often talked about poetry as, he hoped, making a small difference in the world. Making people more free, a little less cruel. It was a kind of act of faith.”
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Mr. Moss financed his literary career by working as an art dealer, placing paintings by Spanish and Italian old masters at the Louvre, the Prado, the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A multilingual bon vivant who spoke Spanish, Italian and some French, he made his name in the art world after befriending the heirs of Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, an Italian count who died in 1955 and left behind a gallery’s worth of great works, including paintings by Goya and Piero della Francesca. Before long, Mr. Moss was placing those pieces in major museums, prompting New York Times art critic John Russell to describe him in 1978 as “an important factor — an ‘eminence grise,’ in the words of one good judge — in the international Old Masters market.”
As Mr. Moss told it, he “had no money or training” when he started selling art, although he did have certain “social advantages.”
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“People liked my jokes,” he said in a 2005 interview with journalist Dylan Foley. “I had personal skills and insights into people. I see certain things that other people don’t see.”
His poems could attest to that. Mr. Moss’s work was filled with striking images, like a nest of swallows atop a Corinthian column or a sunlit Star of David on the back of a green leather chair. Describing a long-ago surgery, he adopted an out-of-body perspective: “Dangling in a lake of blood, a stainless steel hook,/ unbaited, is fishing in my heart for clots.”
“Often autobiographical or commemorative, Moss never lapses into confession or sentimentality,” poet G.E. Murray wrote in the Nation, reviewing Mr. Moss’s 1979 collection “Skull of Adam.”
“Concerned about the meanings he conjures, Moss does what other poets are supposed to do: he puts life into words and gives words a life of their own.”
The younger of two children, Stanley David Moss was born in Queens on June 21, 1925. According to the Times, his surname was originally Moskowitz, which his father, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, shortened when Stanley was a boy. His mother was a homemaker.
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His father, a high school principal who knew Latin and Greek, recited Shakespeare’s sonnets and frequently sparred with Mr. Moss, a prankster who once slipped little stones and jewels into the center of his aunt’s matzoh balls, giving his mother the edge during a family cooking contest.
In “Satyr Song,” an autobiographical essay in which he likened himself to the boisterous, boozing spirits of ancient myth, Mr. Moss recalled a pivotal family vacation to Europe in 1935, when his father was on sabbatical. During his first extended trip out of Queens, he saw Francoist propaganda in Spain; rode a camel in Egypt by the Sphinx; got “nicked in the leg by a ricocheted bullet” in Greece, where the government survived one coup and was felled by another; and wandered into a brothel in Algiers, where he swooned when a “tattooed lady smelling of flowers and sweat kissed me for nothing behind a beaded curtain.”
Back home, Mr. Moss found a different kind of escape through poetry, discovering the work of Lorca, Arthur Rimbaud and Wallace Stevens through a magazine. “They taught me how to survive,” he wrote. When he enlisted in the Navy during World War II at age 17, he went to sea with a copy of Stevens’s debut collection, “Harmonium.”
Mr. Moss suffered a leg injury in 1943, while on active duty, and was discharged the next year with a disability pension, according to the Times. He studied at Trinity College in Connecticut and took drama classes at Yale University, though he did not receive a degree.
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By the end of the decade, he was working as an editor at New Directions, the independent publishing house, and had ensconced himself in New York’s bohemian literary scene.
“I lived in a former coalbin, which I shared with Jean Garrigue, on Ninth Street,” he told the New Yorker. “If I went to bed before four o’clock in the morning, I thought I was doing something awful.”
Mr. Moss moved overseas, following his girlfriend Ana Maria Vandellos to Spain — they married at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Tangiers, Morocco — and teaching English in Rome and Barcelona. While in Italy, he also worked as an editor for Botteghe Oscure, a literary journal founded by the American-born arts patron Marguerite Caetani, the princess of Bassiano.
His first marriage ended in divorce. In 1967, he married Jane Zech, who taught sociology at Columbia University. She survives him, along with a son, Tobia Milla Moss, from a relationship with Adriana Milla; a stepson, Robert Hauser; and two granddaughters.
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Mr. Moss only seemed to grow more prolific as he aged, publishing late-in-life collections including “Almost Complete” (2016), “Abandoned Poems” (2018), “Act V, Scene I” (2020), “Not Yet” (2021) and “Always Alwaysland” (2022). On the page, at least, mortality never seemed far from his mind.
“If there aren’t/ dogs in the afterlife,” he wrote in one late poem, “I’ll stay here.” In another, “Glutton,” he wrote about being “Time’s pretzel, his pistachio nut,” consumed bite by bite over the years: “Eat, eat my Lord,/ you will not swallow me in one gulp./ I will give you such indigestion in Paradise/ with my hard head, stiff neck, broken bones,/ you will wish you were never born. Eat.”
