- Hardcover: 128 pages
- Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (Sep 1 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1556592108
- ISBN-13: 978-1556592102
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.8 x 1.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,938,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Booklist
The dark Stone alludes to in the title of her ninth book of poetry might be the advancing twilight of her failing sight, but then again, to be in the dark is to be unenlightened, ignorant of some necessary truth. Of course, the dark can also be consoling, and Stone does love the glimmering night sky. So she evokes many shades of darkness as she looks back on a long life, although there is little to indicate that this pithy, punning, fractal-dazzled poet is, in fact, entering her 90s. Except for her long perspective, and the keen awareness of how much the texture of our lives has changed over the decades without our becoming at all relevant to the churning cosmos. Stone appeals to the mind's eye and the physical ear, each word tested for ripeness like fruit, each a perfectly held note. Wry animal parables, spare and intense dramas, gorgeous nature lyrics, and bracing metaphysical musings constitute a clarion collection by a National Book Award-winning, and profoundly rewarding, poet. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.2 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
fetching poems by 89 year old blind woman, Oct 28 2004
By Henry Berry "Henry Berry" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: In the Dark (Hardcover)
IN THE DARK by Ruth Stone. Copper Canyon Press, PO Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368; www.coppercanyonpress.org; angela@coppercanyonpress.org. 110+x pp. $22.00 hardcover, ISBN 1-55659-210-8.Ruth Stone is 89, and nearly totally blind. At this age and with this condition, memories make up the substance of her life. For her, memory is virtually a sensation; memory brings her into an intimacy with her surroundings and her past. Feelings and moods are not transient for her. Rather, they are entire universes of different aspects of the world and existence. The "sadness of things/speaks for you." (from "Interim") The flower beds and lawns of a small college--one where Stone likely taught at one time--intone the "quiet authority of culture." (from "Border") The title is somewhat ironic, for Stone illumines her subjects in an almost preternatural way.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful Stones!, Sep 18 2007
By E. R. Savage - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: In the Dark (Paperback)
Ruth Stone's poetry has often been seen as melancholic or "dark" ; but her more recent pieces have an edge, a fierceness of diction and imagery that startles the reader."Living in hell, as I do,
the devil lies in my ear.
Violent endings, devastation,
I am either the shipped out cargo ..." ("The Jewels") etc.
Her National Book Award "In the Next Galaxy" carries her voice to greater peaks still. That voice will never grow old... different, yes, but rejuvenated.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
compex and biting, Jun 26 2007
By John Mcentee - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: In the Dark (Paperback)
Ruth Stone's poetry is inspiring,yet bitter in it's message on aging and loosing one's sight...
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