Kirjahaku

Expertly and sensitively selected by her daughter Bianca, The Essential Ruth Stone bears witness to a vivid fifty-year career of one of America's most influential and pioneering poets. Distilling twelve books into a single volume―from the wild formalism of her early work to the science-filled cosmic intellect of her final collection―The Essential Ruth Stone shows a visionary poet with a physical grasp on language. Dazzling, humorous and grief-stricken poems explore the continuity of loss and love, in the spectral appearances of the dead husband, to portraits of an American childhood, life during wartime, and complex metaphysical inquiries into consciousness itself. Ruth Stone's feminism, mysticism and overall fierceness shine through her wit and passion. Moving gracefully between the loneliness of grief and loss to the fullness of life and love, Stone approaches all her subjects with a profound humanity, an understanding born from her own lived experiences.

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.ShapesIn the longer view it doesn't matter. However, it's that having lived, it matters. So that every death breaks you apart. You find yourself weeping at the door of your own kitchen, overwhelmed by loss. And you find yourself weeping as you pass the homeless person head in hands resigned on a cement step, the wire basket on wheels right there. Like stopped film, or a line of Vallejo, or a sketch of the mechanics of a wing by Leonardo. All pauses in space, a violent compression of meaning in an instant within the meaningless. Even staring into the dim shapes at the farthest edge; accepting that blur."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 her to be simply inspired."--USA TodayRuth Stone was born in Virginia in 1915. She is author of eight books of poems and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. She lives in Vermont.

"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 OregonianRuth 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.

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 farwith 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 flowthat creeps from plot to plot along a street;affluent, weedless, slow, and cancerous;pressure from the magma populacefor 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.

"An aging poet's failing eyesight informs this collection . . . some of which recall the spirit of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Dark but not hopeless, they spring from Stone's lucid inner vision, which is straightforward, musical, and defiant."--Utne Now available in paperback, In the Dark, winner of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, is Ruth Stone's follow-up to her National Book Award--winning In the Next Galaxy. Personal issues of memory, aging, and loss are balanced against profound political and cultural change. Stone has been called a "people's poet" whose work is "profoundly rewarding," and she writes a poetry of everyday life that recasts the mundane as indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age, Stone, then eighty-nine, replied: "There's no question."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.

Ruth Stone once said, ‘I decided very early on not to write like other people.’ What Love Comes To shows the fruits of this resolve in the lifetime’s work of a true American original. The winner of the National Book Award at the age of 87, Ruth Stone was still writing extraordinary poetry well into her 90s. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce feminist and political poems, and meditations on her husband’s suicide, on love, loss, blindness and ageing. What Love Comes To opens up her own particular world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The book has a foreword by Sharon Olds, who ‘had the joy of meeting Ruth Stone’ as a teenager, a later encounter giving her ‘a vision of a genius at work’: ‘Ruth Stone’s poems are mysterious, hilarious, powerful. They are understandable, often with a very clear surface, but not simple – their intelligence is crackling and complex… She is a poet of great humor – mockery even – and a bold eye, not obedient. There is also disrespect in her poems, a taken freedom, that feels to me like a strength of the disenfranchised. Ruth’s poems are direct and lissome, her plainness is elegant and shapely, her music is basic, classical: it feels as real as the movement of matter. When we hear a Stone first line, it is as if we have been hearing this voice in our head all day, and just now the words become audible. She is a seer, easily speaking clear truths somehow unmentioned until now… She has a tragic deadpan humor: love and destruction are right next to each other…’