Poetry
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Overview
“Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.”—Galway Kinnell on presenting the Wallace Stevens Award
“In the Next Galaxy gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her ’80s, fully inhabiting body and mind.”—National Book Award Judges’ statement
“Compassionate, comic, feminist and horrified by injustice, Stone’s poems are composed with an accessible deftness.”—The Oregonian
Ruth Stone has earned nearly every major literary award for her poetry. She taught at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. Today she lives in Vermont.
Winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Poetry
Synopsis
Ruth Stone writes with crackling intelligence from the vantage point of an aging and impoverished woman. Wise, sardonic, crafty, and misleadingly simple, Stone loves heavy themes but loathes heavy poems.
About the Author Ruth Stone, born in Virginia in 1915, has rightly been called America's Akhmatova and is considered "Mother Poet" to many contemporary writers. She is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Whiting Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award. She raised three daughters alone while teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, UC Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at SUNY Binghampton. Today, Ruth Stone lives in Vermont.
Drunken Boat
Ruth Stone began late, achieving her most powerful works with maturity and continuing their scope and span into age where most poets fall into silence or repetition.
Editorials
Drunken Boat
Ruth Stone began late, achieving her most powerful works with maturity and continuing their scope and span into age where most poets fall into silence or repetition.Publishers Weekly
The much-lauded octogenarian Stone keeps up her appealing, sadder-but-wiser lyricism as she surveys subjects from McCormick reapers to radio astronomy, from fractals to "folded wings" and the fatigue of age, in this eighth collection, her first since the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ordinary Words (1999). Stone veers easily between compressed stories of her Virginia upbringing and her own life, on the one hand, and scenic Americana on the other, finding material in "New York mountain weather," roaming cats, "the railroad 's edge of metal trash." A third sort of Stone poem begins and ends in abstraction, finding spare lines for dejection or reflection, or asking, simply, "How can I live like this?" Stone's lifetime of craft permits her to pare down both description and meditation and, at her best, make startling use of short, slow lines and of occasional rhyme; standout lyric work like "Train Ride" or "At Eighty-Three She Lives Alone" recalls at once Stanley Kunitz and Kay Ryan, and should find a place in many anthologies. Stone's lesser poems can digress into mere jottings; she tends to top off her terse scenes and speculations with forceful (sometimes forced) closing statements, what she calls "severe abstract designs." Even those poems, however, reflect an observant and contemplative life, focused on simplicities of feeling, yet possessed of unfolding subtleties.USA Today
Ruth Stone's work is alternately witty, bawdy, touching, and profound. But never pompous. Her honesty and originality give her writing a sense of youth and newness because she looks at the world so clearly, without all the detritus of social convention the rest of us pick up along the way... Her writing proves to be simply inspired.Publishers Weekly
The much-lauded octogenarian Stone keeps up her appealing, sadder-but-wiser lyricism as she surveys subjects from McCormick reapers to radio astronomy, from fractals to "folded wings" and the fatigue of age, in this eighth collection, her first since the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ordinary Words (1999). Stone veers easily between compressed stories of her Virginia upbringing and her own life, on the one hand, and scenic Americana on the other, finding material in "New York mountain weather," roaming cats, "the railroad's edge of metal trash." A third sort of Stone poem begins and ends in abstraction, finding spare lines for dejection or reflection, or asking, simply, "How can I live like this?" Stone's lifetime of craft permits her to pare down both description and meditation, and, at her best, make startling use of short, slow lines and of occasional rhyme; standout lyric work like "Train Ride" or "At Eighty-Three She Lives Alone" recalls at once Stanley Kunitz and Kay Ryan, and should find a place in many anthologies. Stone's lesser poems can digress into mere jottings; she tends to top off her terse scenes and speculations with forceful (sometimes forced) closing statements, what she calls "severe abstract designs." Even those poems, however, reflect an observant and contemplative life, focused on simplicities of feeling, yet possessed of unfolding subtleties. (June) Forecast: Stone's advanced age, her accessibility and her high standing among other writers may all provoke comparisons to Marie Ponsot, though her small output brings her closer to Virginia Hamilton Adair. Either way, the NBA should generate interest in this follow-up, and solid sales that might be boosted by displaying this book among nonfiction titles on aging. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999 for Ordinary Words, Stone is now in her eighties, having published her first book of poetry when she was 44. Stone writes conversationally, with lyricism, honesty, wit, and plenty of focus on the passage of time. The suicide of her much-loved husband 40 years ago is a frequent theme, as are observations about aging (which she has achieved with great wisdom), the lives of her young students and neighbors, and ecological and political concerns. Stone notices and brings to her poems everyday items like marbles ("Held up to light,/ a small hole/ into another dimension"), an unplugged electric fan ("staring at the floor/ with the nonexpression of the working class/ temporarily laid off"), and cabbages ("blooms like Rubens nudes"). Her uses of subtle and occasional rhyme, off-rhyme, and inner rhyme are delicate and always appropriate. Highly recommended.-Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., HaywardBook Details
Published
May 1, 2002
Publisher
Copper Canyon Press
Pages
110
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781556591785