Howard Moss is pre-eminently—though certainly not exclusively—an urban poet. I know of no other contemporary poet who can so marvelously evoke a city—say, New York, but that is no matter. His relationship with the city is as complex as the city itself. It is a fine blend of distaste, faintly derisive love, and—one needs to say "nostalgia," though conscious of another injured word. The city is fragmented, and one of the prime strengths of Moss's poetry is its sense of fragmentations: of time, of love, of physical surroundings, of social relationships. The shards represent fragments of things which once were whole….

Key words in Moss's poetry are "dark" and "light"; above all, he is fascinated by the mystifying and crucial moments in which they meet, the crepuscular encounter. In "Nearing The Lights" [in Buried City], for example, a whole series of speculations and relationships...