Thanks for the thoughtful review of my new book of poems, Singing the Forge, by the Kirkus Review.
As they noted, “Mosson’s a poet’s poet whose craft is finely honed.” The review from June 2025 is linked here.
The book is out now, see here.
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA
Big thanks to The Broadkill Review of Delaware, under the wings of new editors, for including my poem, “Hiding in the Theater,” in the Summer / Fall issue this year. It has been a fun ride writing, revising, changing back, tinkering, forgetting about, and then finishing it, over these past twenty years. As the speaker says in the poem, “Say hi in the eddy.” The poem is linked below:
https://www.broadkillreview.com/post/hiding-in-the-theater-by-g-h-mosson
I have enjoying finding five other poems accepted, then published online with BlazeVox: An Online Journal of Voice, this past spring and into the summer. It’s been a nice surprise, in terms of the feel of their vibe and the editor’s general enthusiasm for the chorus of contemporary poetry. The editor, Geoffrey Gatza, is a poet himself, also publishes BlazeVox Books. Hope to meet him someday. As he might say, “Rockets!”
These five poems are linked below, including one that I personally hold close, “Marsh Yoga”, so click here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/66627dabf7b72f0d137f876e/t/6810cfe4dc5b46064718a5e4/1745932261373/Spring+25+-+G.H.+Mosson.pdf
Not to quote us all in ascending order of importance, but as Bugs Bunny says, “that’s all folks!”
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA
I am thrilled to announce the debut reading from my new book of poems, SINGING THE FORGE (2025), at The Ivy Bookstore in Baltimore, Maryland, on Sunday, June 8, 2025, starting at 4pm. I will be reading with poet Reggie Harris, formerly of Baltimore, now of NYC, a fine poet who, along with yours truly and an engaging diverse open-mike, should be a knock-out, kick off summer event before we get hot, hot, hot in Maryland.
About SINGING THE FORGE, this book of poems covers three decades of my work and “explores the singing of what’s shaped us and what we’ve shaped for ourselves. Through poems at times personal, plus vignettes from men and women of the past two centuries in the book’s middle section, these poems offer mirrors of becomings. Readers encounter melodies from diverse lives. Across free verse, meter, and poems of organic form, you might just see yourself.”
You can peruse more or purchase it from the IVY BOOKSTORE (Click here) or wherever books are sold.
Many thanks to the HOT L READING SERIES AND IVY for hosting this reading! The event page can be found online here and event itself here:
The Ivy Bookshop – Back Patio 5928 Falls Road Baltimore, MD 21209
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA
I am excited to announce my new book of poems, Singing the Forge, from David Robert Books, out now. The typesetting was just finished in early March. Much thanks to wonderful yogi and artist, Jess Frey, for the spectacular cover, and David Robert Books of Word Tech Communications LLC (Ohio, USA) for their work and support.
Singing the Forge explores the singing of what’s shaped us and what we’ve shaped for ourselves. Through poems at times personal, plus vignettes from men and women of the past two centuries in the book’s middle section, these poems offer mirrors of becomings. Readers encounter melodies from diverse lives. Across free verse, meter, and poems of organic form, you might just see yourself.
Right now, it can be ordered via this link or through your local bookstore!
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA
Discussion & Workshop
(Thursday Evening, 730pm, March 6, 2025)
EASTERN SHORE WRITERS ASSOCIATION, MD, VIA ZOOM
This month, I am hosting an online workshop to discuss and have fun with the last lines of poems, eight kinds, through the Eastern Shore Writers Association, and registration is free. Link below with more details.
It has been interesting to see different poets do different things, as I have prepared for this presentation. For instance, the famous couplet conclusion of a Shakespearean sonnet (conclusion ending) resonates with a less obvious imagistic closing tercet of Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense” (image ending).
Right now I have eight kinds of endings in my taxonomy. Of course, I consider these eight categories, as applied, often primary. That is, usually there are other resonances afoot.
For instance, Shakespeare’s closing couplet in Sonnet 18 concludes the poem’s argument, but also resonates by refocusing on many levels, say from season to art, when compared to the opening line. Likewise, Gilbert in the above poem uses an image that creates an open-ended resonance, yet on further examination, the image also summarizes the poem’s argument as well as shifts the poem’s opening theme when compared to its first line.
Link below with more details.
LINK: https://www.easternshorewriters.org/event-6073413
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA
I was recently looking through this book, published in 2019, but taking place closer to 2012, and wish I had circulated more with it at the time.
Nevertheless as the book title hints, I was just too busy with family and making a living. This said, the book garnered three reviews and one reading at the Enoch Pratt Library, in downtown Baltimore, Md.
The Midwest Book Review’s November 2021 review via Donovan’s Bookshelf monthly newsletter is excerpted below, as the link is cumbersome. Cheers.
KIRKUS REVIEW (JULY 2021) (Linked here)
LOCH RAVEN REVIEW (by Editor Dan Cuddy) (Linked here)
Diane Donovan’s Bookshelf (November 2021) (linked here)
(hosted by MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW)
(AN EXCERPT)
Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time by G.H. Mosson
Finishing Line Press (March 2019, ISBN: 9781635348491, $14.99)
Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time is a poetry collection the entire family can enjoy, and captures a father’s love for his daughter and son with pieces that celebrate growth and family connections.
These free verses offer readers the chance to view their own families in a different light against the mirror of G.H. Mosson’s experience with time’s passage, growth, and interactions with his kids:
“Firecracker daughter,/your volcano of energy exhausts my imagination. I always thought/imagination meant walking in a moonlit field weeping/Where was I? And where have I traveled to? The easy answer: time.”
The narrator questions the legacy he transmits to the next generation (“If I am not a dreamer, how will my son know me?”) while also transmitting to this generation poetic pieces that will resonate with young listeners and observers:
“Thinnest crescent in the night, your moonbeams gleam/a tinsel light, and two tiny stars nearby/are just as bright./I think you’ll play together tonight/when I’m not watching.”
As the pieces for adults in the first half weave into verse for children in the second half, the entire family will find the arc of the book also evocative and reflective of the parenting experience:
It’s unusual to see a poetry collection that can appeal across generations, but Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time is such a production.
Diane C. Donovan, Senior Reviewer
Donovan’s Literary Services
www.donovansliteraryservices.com
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA
Thanks so much to JMWW Journal, Loch Raven Review, and Wayne Literary Review for publishing four poems of mine in Fall 2024.
Wayne Literary Review out of Wayne State University published a poem written in the 2022-2023 time frame, but the remainder of them date back one or two decades to the first draft.
While “How Far, Two Stars,” is based on work from 2005, most of that was revised out, so it is mostly new.
To check it out, click on the titles below:
WHISTLER’S SKETCHBOOK: COME SEE WITH ME
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA
Thank you to the editors of The Potomac Review (Maryland), Main Street Rag (North Carolina), California Quarterly (Calif.), SurVision (Ireland), and Compass Rose Literary Journal (D.C. / online) for 2024 publications of my poetry! I appreciate it.
This poem, “Sand Mandala,” appeared the Summer 2024 issue of Main Street Rag, a poem close to my heart, because unlike some of my work, autobiographical. While I don’t usually reprint, I shall here with irregular formatting as I cannot style it correctly through Web design:
Sand Mandala
As our June afternoon becomes
sweaty becoming laughs becoming plans
becoming children’s tugs, why not
whistle these steps into a dance?
Why not mold our circumstance to craft
mementos out of colored sand
as joy peacocks us to parade
or we huddle for some storm to end?
I’ll touch this question into a path
before let go—and the sand rivers home.
Tibetan monks from the Dalai Lama’s compound in India came through Baltimore, Maryland again this summer.
It was the first time I’ve seen them since the beginning of the pandemic. The above mandala was completed from sand on a Sunday at the cusp of the transformation-back ceremony. I was blessed to attend it. I also attended a morning meditation led by three monks from the traveling cohort alongside my teenage daughter. What could be better!
Cheers, in gratitude,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA
The heat of summer has hit Maryland. Oppressive, it’s feels just right. I have noticed the grass has stopped aggressively growing, which it did all June. Together we are baking and making our way in a slower cadence. Of course, time for summer reading! I am reading these gems right now:
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (Vintage 2024)
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (Simon & Schuster 2023)
Crossing the Tape (poems) by Michael Salcman (Spuyten Duyvil 2024)
The River Is the Reason (poems) by Meredith Davies Hadaway (Word Tech 2011)
Rumi’s Little Book of Life: The Garden of the Soul, the Heart, and the Spirit by Rumi (trans. Maryam Mafi & Melita Kolin) (Hampton Roads Publishing 2012)
I just finished Maggie Smith’s hybrid text memoir about her life during and just after divorce, combined with a bird’s eye view of her life as a working poet and concerned mother, her hopes as an adult, plus her ascent into national recognition, all jumbled together. Composed of vignettes of one to two pages, notes to self, vows and questions, and sparingly, the occasional poem, Smith’s shared self-exploration is a moving account.
Smith’s husband is a college playwright and adult lawyer, she reports, so the book explores what it means for them to live out different sort of dreams, including him being the breadwinner, maybe abandoning writing (though that is at most implied), and Smith becoming increasingly engaged with literary events and teaching gigs as the marriage frays. These days, Smith’s poetry career, and now prose too, has taken off. It provides the income that did not exist during the marriage, which is a poignant arc of the memoir evident in the events, though the point is not emphasized.
What is explored here? Love, betrayal, parenting in divorce, the writing life, how it all happens, what to make of it, how to feel about it. Smith’s collage notebook of a memoir has the atmosphere of both breezy open window and echoing water well.
It has occurred to me — with Tolstoy’s fictional memoir is on my bed stand (“Childhood Boyhood Youth”) and waiting for me to read into the middle section — whether Smith’s hybrid format can really equal heartfelt realism exemplified by Tolstoy in depth of detail, compared to entertainment and surprise. Maybe it does not have to. Smith’s book also is not a tell all. Rather, it’s insightful, self-reflective, searching, and at times, gregarious and fun.
I also am one story away from finishing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories: ineffable and poignant tales from an esteemed writer who now lives in Italy. I remember her first two books, but have not kept up with her oeuvre. Lahiri can write about the mundane in meticulous yet effortless detail and with tremulous resonance.
If someone else told you one of her stories at a dinner party, you might scoot off bored. In her hands, you travel to Italy, enter other people’s lives, hear the bird outside or see the watermarks stain on a used glass, while diving into universal humanity, to arrive back in your chair. Wonderful.
While less dramatic in Roman Stories than the great Irish short story teller William Trevor, her elegant simplicity like Trevor gets at the heart of people’s lives, each unique and intricate, though none of them here would, on the street passing by, catch your eye. If a future society asked, What was it like for an average individual including non-Italian immigrants to live in colossal Rome in 2010-2024?, these stories would be a historian’s treasure trove.
Michael Salcman and Meredith Davies Hadaway are Maryland poets that write delicate work. Salcman’s Crossing the Tape takes place in his ’70s, and does so with range, grace and his usual cosmopolitan insight. Divided into five sections, there are ekphrastic poems, poems on war and social violence, plus poems on intimacy, everyday living, and aging. Recommended. Salcman is moody, wise, intelligent, erudite, and caring; he deserves a national audience.
Hadaway’s 2011 The River Is the Reason is themed around the ways of rivers, which is fun way to craft a book for the reader. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Hadaway writes sparingly and exacting as might early William Carlos Williams if alive today. However rather than crowded and urban New Jersey, the atmosphere here involves the open space, rivers and breezes, and the broad sky of Maryland’s eastern shoreline. I had the pleasure to see her read recently, and she identifies herself as an environmental or ecological poet, observing with care more than loudly political. Recommended.
Click on their names to find out more about Salcman and Hadaway.
Maryam Mafi & Melita Kolin’s translation of timeless Rumi poems hits the spot. It is my second time dipping into this collection. Stunning stuff.
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA
