Perhaps no contemporary American poet writes so convincingly of the urban scene as Howard Moss. Indeed, it seems to me that, like roads and Rome, all city poems—especially those singing the virtues, vices and niceties of New York—lead to Mr. Moss. There is little question that in his National Book Award collection Selected Poems (1972) and, later, Buried City (1975), Moss staked a substantial claim on the strange, terrifying and wonderful territory we understand as the city. But Moss lays claim to other domains as well, specifically, the rarefied art of the light verse he assembles in A Swim off the Rocks.

In a time of cultural fallout, social shabbiness, and intellectual cribbing, when force-fed fad often supplants a good dose of whimsey, many have come to believe that writing that isn't "serious" isn't important. Not so, contends Mr. Moss. A Swim off the Rocks is at once clever, frivolous, well-crafted, outrageous, and, ultimately, genuine. Sometimes it's simply a matter of verbal fun, as in being a tourist "embarrassed in Paris in Harris tweed," or again when "Finding, in Frankfurt, that one indigestible / Comestible makes them too ill for the Festival," or pure pun…. (pp. 964-65)

Truth cast in the stone of understatement is a weapon with which Moss strikes home regularly. "Tennis: A Portrait" tells the real score of the game:

        Your triumph is to watch the set
 
        From the sidelines while you cheer the serves
        Smashed over by the stupid young.
        They do not know how the wind swerves
        The best-aimed shot from its target. Stung
 
        By age, high-strung among the doubles, only
        You are single. They miss the mark,
        Your verbal strokes—each lob, each volley
        As bright, and seedy, as New York, New York.
 
        You know the score—your nets of wit
        Hide your fine hand and, hand in glove,
        Time's racket lays no bets on it,
        Though it was once, at thirty, love.

This is heavyweight light verse, no vehicle for an amateur. It takes a daring and inventive poet to succeed in being so painfully funny without resorting to wearing a lampshade at a party. (pp. 965-66)