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...