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Synopsis
Wise and sardonic follow-up to Ruth Stone's National Book Award in Poetry.
Library Journal
At 89, award-winning poet Stone (In the Next Galaxy) continues to write and publish. Her new volume concerns loss of vision and other faculties diminished by age: "the hand trembles,/ and the three-dimensional/ words in their electrical/ circuits come to the gates/ and find them locked." She pins down the homely details of everyday life with deadpan humor: "Your gray glasses are for playing the piano./ Your brown glasses, for strong reading./ Nothing but sugar in the cupboard./ That's when the voice from the galaxy/ comes back, saying praise be, it had a good/ sleep; it is ready to translate." 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 like "My Mother's Phlox," where flowers sent by the poet via UPS merge seamlessly with mother love and poetry, gifts that "need almost no care./ They cast their seed. They thrive on neglect." For all poetry collections. E.M. Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine LLP Law Lib., New York Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.