Synopses & Reviews
When asked whether poets improve with age Ruth Stone, 89, replied: “There’s no question. If your brain goes on and on, as it should under normal conditions, there’s more in it and your writing will get more profound.”
Year after year, Ruth Stone’s poems turn ever more penetrating. Fresh from her National Book Award, this prophetic new book is filled with winter, fractals, and passionate aging:
From “What is a Poem?”:
Having come this far
with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.
Science, politics, art, and fellow small-town citizens all play pivotal roles in her poems. From the cilia in the ear of an owl to cheap paint peeling off the walls, Ruth Stone presents a world dissected and revealed:
From “The Driveway”:
Asphalt is a kind of urban lava flow
that creeps from plot to plot along a street;
affluent, weedless, slow, and cancerous;
pressure from the magma populace
for easy maintenance; neat status-symbolic,
easy to wash with the garden hose.
“Her poems startle us over and over,” Galway Kinnell said when presenting Stone the Wallace Stevens Award, “with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness . . . the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.”
Ruth Stone is the author of nine books of poetry. She is the recipient of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Award (with which she bought plumbing for her house) and two Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which roofed her house). After her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. For twenty years she taught creative writing at many universities, finally settling at Binghamton University. Today, Ruth Stone lives in Vermont.
Review
"At 89, award-winning poet Stone (In the Next Galaxy) continues to write and publish....While this late work lacks some of the sharp edge and linguistic energy of the earlier poems, there is a kind of gorgeous ease in poems..." Library Journal
Synopsis
In the follow-up to her National Book Award-winning In the Next Galaxy, Ruth Stone returns to issues of memory, aging, and loss. Balancing her own personal history against profound political and cultural changes, she continues with direct witty poems which do not flinch when addressing issues of power and oppression. She has been called a "people's poet" and "America's Akhmatova," writing a poetry of everyday life which recasts the mundane as important and indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age Stone, 89, replied: "There's no question. If your brain goes on and on, as it should under normal conditions, there's more in it and your writing will get more profound."
Synopsis
Poetry. When asked whether poets improve with age Ruth Stone, 89, replied: "There's no question. If your brain goes on and on, as it should under normal conditions, there's more in it and your writing will get more profound." Year after year, Ruth Stone's poems turn ever more penetrating. Fresh from her National Book Award, this prophetic new book is filled with winter, fractals, and passionate aging. Ruth Stone is the author of nine books of poetry. She is the recipient of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Award and two Guggenheim Fellowships. Today, Ruth Stone lives in Vermont.
Synopsis
Wise and sardonic follow-up to Ruth Stone's National Book Award in Poetry.
About the Author
Ruth Stone (born June 8, 1915, in Roanoke, Virginia) is an American poet. She is the author of thirteen books of poetry. She is the recipient of many awards and honors. In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. (As she has pointed out, her poems are "love poems, all written to a dead man" who forced her to "reside in limbo" with her daughters.) For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at State University of New York Binghamton. Today, Stone lives in Vermont.