Singing the Forge

Mosson blends personal reflection with broader historical context in this collection of free verse and metered poems.

The poet shares intimate thoughts and evocative scenes circling themes of memory, mortality, and nature. Remarkable places and people make up the foundation of the book’s first part, from a poem grounded in Oregon’s Mount Hood to recollections of a bygone grandmother. Tulips burst forth in the nation’s capital on a “seasonal seam between winter and spring” (“Domination of Tulips in Washington D.C.”). As a stunning day ends, families disperse to their homes or cabins while the speaker witnesses “the ocean’s heaving deepen to bruised navy” (“Long Island Waves of Childhood”). Mosson also invites readers into the art world, where he contemplates Hans Hofmann’s painting “Autumn Gold” and Henry Moore’s bronze “Seated Woman” sculpture. Those unfamiliar with or uninterested in Mosson’s niche interests, as in a series of poems inspired by American artist James McNeill Whistler’s sketches, may find their attention waning. However, in the book’s second section, the poet spins vignettes featuring everyday people, including Sue, a widowed mother of two serving tea to gentleman caller Bert, and Jan, a flight attendant abandoned by her husband. Mosson takes on soldiers’ perspectives in “Letter by a French Soldier, 1916, Found at Verdun” and “Visiting Verdun.” He muses on a haunted Baltimore, Maryland, destination in “Ghost of Green Mount Cemetery.” The book concludes with “Summer Voyage at Thirty-Eight,” effectively juxtaposing the weariness of caring for a young family with the glorious resurgence of spring and summer. Mosson is a poet’s poet whose craft is finely honed, if sometimes labyrinthine. His reverence for nature undergirds the poems’ picturesque descriptions, like “Worn obelisks of black granite / bake beneath barely touching, thin pines / like jaw-bones of fossilized gods” in “Leaving the Black Hills,” or how “the plunged sun spills orange and brass / to ooze purple over the porous land” in “Walking the Horizon.”

An expansive, if sometimes-dense, meditation on beauty.