The buried life is encompassed by community in Howard Moss's Buried City…. Beginning in the Lascaux caves, the title poem wends through an art gallery, movie house, and "Hegelian doubletalk" to the centrifugal emblem of drollity, "Baked in lava, the figures at Pompeii." Moss twits wordplay while implying he takes little fun from it. Usually the jokes are toxic…. Moss's rhythms, at least, are infectious. But his techniques are not limited to the superficial; to the contrary, they are subversive. Internal patterns are more than trickery, breath is caught and released in precise art. Sometimes, as in "Sawdust," the effect is amusement. Elsewhere the same rigor, tied more tightly, exploits suspense, as in the crash landing at the bottom of "The Stairs."… Unlike the winding stairs of Yeats or Dante, Moss's go down only. It is rumored that there is no emigration from the buried city; these are...