Essential Ruth Stone - Softcover

Stone, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556596081 ISBN 13: 9781556596087

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2020

Synopsis

Expertly and sensitively selected by her granddaughter 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.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Stone (1915-2011) was the author of thirteen books of poetry. Her first book, In an Iridescent Time, was published in 1959, the year of her husband’s death. As a single mother of three daughters, Stone traveled throughout the United States, working as a poet and educator. She served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont and also received many honors during her lifetime, including the 2002 National Book Award for Poetry. Her last book, What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Talking Fish

My love’s eyes are red as the sargasso
With lights behind the iris like a cephalopod’s.
The weeds move slowly, November’s diatoms
Stain the soft stagnant belly of the sea.
Mountains, atolls, coral reefs,
Do you desire me? Am I among the jellyfish of your griefs?
I comb my sorrows singing; any doomed sailor can hear
The rising and falling bell and begin to wish
For home. There is no choice among the voices
Of love. Even a carp sings.



Pokeberries

I started out in the Virginia mountains
with my grandma’s pansy bed
and my aunt Maud’s dandelion wine.
We lived on greens and back-fat and biscuits.
My aunt Maud scrubbed right through the linoleum.
My daddy was a northerner who played drums
and chewed tobacco and gambled.
He married my mama on the rebound.
Who would want an ignorant hill girl with red hair?
They took a Pullman up to Indianapolis
and someone stole my daddy’s wallet.
My whole life has been stained with pokeberries.
No man seemed right for me. I was awkward
until I found a good wood-burning stove.
There is no use asking what it means.
With my first piece of ready cash I bought my own
place in Vermont; kerosene lamps, dirt road.
I’m sticking here like a porcupine up a tree.
Like the one our neighbor shot. Its bones and skin
hung there for three years in the orchard.
No amount of knowledge can shake my grandma out of me;
or my aunt Maud; or my mama, who didn’t just bite an apple
with her big white teeth. She split it in two.



What We Have

On the mountain
the neighbor’s dog, put out in the cold,
comes to my house for the night.
He quivers with gratitude.
His short-haired small stout body
settles near the stove.
He snores.
Out there in the dark, snow falls.
The birch trees are wrapped in their white bandages.
Recently in the surgical theater,
I looked in the mirror at the doctor’s hands
as he repaired my ancient frescos.
When I was ten
we lived in a bungalow in Indianapolis.
My sister and brother, my mother and father,
all living then.
We were like rabbits
in the breast fur of a soft lined nest.
I know now we were desperately poor.
But it was spring:
the field, a botanist’s mirage of wild flowers.
The house centered between two railroad tracks.
The tracks split at the orchard end of the street
and spread in a dangerous angle down either side.
Long lines of freight for half an hour clicking by;
or a passenger train,
with a small balcony at the end of the last car
where someone always stood and waved to us.
At night the wrenching scream and Doppler whistle
of the two a.m. express.
From my window I could see a fireman stoking
the open fire, the red glow reflected in the black smoke
belching from the boiler.
Once I got up and went outside.
The trees-of-heaven along the track swam in white mist.
The sky arched with sickle pears.
Lilacs had just opened.
I pulled the heavy clusters to my face
and breathed them in,
suffused with a strange excitement
that I think, when looking back, was happiness.



Poetry

The sentence is basically a story.
Even a few words attach to the lifetime.
The mouth cannot forget
the story of the fingers.

Like comb jelly,
like canned condensed air,
like the full sac of the cobra;
the bitter milk of the tongue.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556596081
• ISBN 13: 9781556596087
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96
• Editor: Stone Bianca