The New Yorker this week... poems by Stanley Moss & Clive James... 2 old pros... something historic... better than everything else in the issue (though James Wood's review of VS Naipaul biography a closet 2nd)...

Clive James, I have to admit, did a pretty good thing in "Signing Ceremony" : Yeatsian... the wisdom of old age... the oldsters coming to terms with being, really, tourists in the world... pretty well done, despite some falling-off (obscurity?) toward the end... despite the fact that we have moved, spiritually, beyond Horace, in the last couple millennia... really...

- my reservations having to do with his Whitman put-down in recent Poetry essay... which, actually, Stanley Moss's fine poem {"Peace") demolishes pretty much in toto... no rhyme & meter there, but a tour-de-force anyway...