A Swim Off The Rocks collects Howard Moss's light verse, written over a thirty-year span. It is a wry gathering. Sadly, light verse seems to be a dying or quiescent art, so that Moss not only delights us with his own work, but reminds us of past masters…. The elegant economy and anarchic absurdities of such poetry succeed in many forms and have simultaneous purposes—nowhere better described than by Moss himself, in an essay on Edward Lear, as "an entertainment, a release, and a form of criticism." These occur, first, in the poet's witty manipulation of language itself—outrageous rhymes, wicked puns, startling enjambments—and so at once reveal and revel in the tenuousness of meaning. And this preposterous dialect is joined with a distanced perspective that permits depths to be touched with biting satire or mock-heroic banter…. The best poems here are "Modified Sonnets" (clever Shakespearean...