#Review: Singing the Forge by G. H. Mosson

Singing the Forge
Author: G. H. Mosson
Publisher:  David Robert Books / WordTech Communications
Rating: 4/5

Reading G.H. Mosson’s Singing the Forge felt like walking through the echoes of memory — personal and collective — where “what’s shaped us and what we’ve shaped for ourselves” becomes both question and confession. The poems oscillate between quiet introspection and social witness, drawing their strength from observation rather than ornament. Mosson’s voice isn’t loud; it hums — the kind of hum that lingers after the song ends.

What I loved most is how seamlessly he merges the ordinary with the mythic. When he writes of “songless streets of Baltimore,” it’s not just geography — it’s a metaphor for every place that has forgotten its music. His recurring imagery of trees, streets, and tools forges (pun fully intended) a tactile connection between creation and endurance. There’s something profoundly human in lines like “The nursing home is out there like a shark / that has swallowed so many of my patients one by one.” Brutally tender, this moment exemplifies Mosson’s gift for turning raw truth into art.

Stylistically, he moves between free verse and more formal meters with enviable ease. The poems evoke painters like Hans Hofmann and Henry Moore not by imitation but by resonance — each line sculpted, each pause deliberate. If there’s a flaw, it’s perhaps the occasional overindulgence in reflective abstraction; a few poems seem to ponder themselves into mist. Yet even there, one senses the poet’s restless search for “harmony with the universe — even if harmony’s always at the verge of disintegration.”

In short, Singing the Forge is not just a collection; it’s a conversation between silence and song — one that invites you to listen, and maybe, to remember your own forging.

Find this book here.