In the Next Galaxy
by Ruth Stone
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Ruth Stone has rightly been called America's Akhmatova, and she is considered "Mother Poet" to many contemporary writers. In this, her eighth volume, she writes with crackling intelligence, interrogating history from the vantage point of an aging and impoverished woman. Wise, sardonic, crafty, and misleadingly simple, Stone loves heavy themes but loathes heavy poems.Tags
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The more I read the poetry of Ruth Stone, the more I regret her passing in 2011. She weaves the natural world, current events, the lives of other characters, and science into the web of telling her own life. With unassuming eloquence, she speaks in a diction that is both commonplace and vivid:
"the power of nothing to multiply.
Turning the hand over to become the palm,
for a moment it can shape itself into a cup of water."
In this passage and throughout, Stone seeks a deep acceptance of what is and what has been so that she may live in the now, despite the terrible loss built into our very existence:
"Then the absent tree when the play yard is paved with asphalt,
a blank space where the tree was, a space that the birds pass pver,
where the show more wind does not pause."
Or in describing her decades as a widow:
"in my thirty years of knowing you
cell by cell in my widow's shawl,
we have lived together longer
in the discontinuous films of my sleep
that we did in our warm parasitical bodies"
In all, she finds "unreasoning hope" in the flights of starlings, in the "language of the meanings within the meanings" contained in the growth of cabbage in her garden, in her dreams and memories. This is an adult book of poetry for those readers who have lived long enough not to be impressed with bathos or the false art of faithless language twisted into pretense. Read it. Savor it. show less
"the power of nothing to multiply.
Turning the hand over to become the palm,
for a moment it can shape itself into a cup of water."
In this passage and throughout, Stone seeks a deep acceptance of what is and what has been so that she may live in the now, despite the terrible loss built into our very existence:
"Then the absent tree when the play yard is paved with asphalt,
a blank space where the tree was, a space that the birds pass pver,
where the show more wind does not pause."
Or in describing her decades as a widow:
"in my thirty years of knowing you
cell by cell in my widow's shawl,
we have lived together longer
in the discontinuous films of my sleep
that we did in our warm parasitical bodies"
In all, she finds "unreasoning hope" in the flights of starlings, in the "language of the meanings within the meanings" contained in the growth of cabbage in her garden, in her dreams and memories. This is an adult book of poetry for those readers who have lived long enough not to be impressed with bathos or the false art of faithless language twisted into pretense. Read it. Savor it. show less
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Poetry volumes by single author
121 works; 8 members
Author Information
17+ Works 420 Members
Ruth Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1915. By the age of 19, she was a married woman and studying at the University of Illinois. While there, she met Walter Stone, who became her second husband after she divorced her first husband. While on sabbatical in England in 1959, Walter Stone hung himself at the age of 42. Her first collection, In show more an Iridescent Time, was published in 1959. Her other works include Topography and Other Poems, American Milk, The Solution, Simplicity, and What Love Comes To. She won the National Book Award in 2002 for In the Next Galaxy. She taught English and creative writing at the State University of New York in Binghamton. She died of natural causes on November 19, 2011 at the age of 96. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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