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How Else to Love the World

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Award-winning poet Myrna Stone presents How Else to Love the World, an anthology of original free-verse poetry in forms ranging from stanzas to stream-of-consciousness near- prose. At times sensual in its celebration of desire, at times burning with ambition and vivacious joy, at times revealing the darker side of yielding to impulses, How Else to Love the World is a most deliciously nuanced offering from cover to cover. "Yes": Flatterer, / little arbiter / of assent / and admission, you cross our lips / with a sycophantic lisp / that Eve heard first / from the mouth / of the trickster, / that maw of tongue / and jaw, of japery / and spleen, into which / she looked just once / perceiving nothing / of consequence.

It is essential for anyone who is literate and human to experience these poems. It is easy to say what these poems are not. They are not "confessional"; this poet does not burden us with the intensity of her own emotions triggered by the common or unusual thrills and horrors of living. Myrna Stone's poems are not obscure; she does not torture her reader with poems whose meaning, if any, is buried beneath fragments or constructions of language that do not communicate.

These poems are rich, brilliant, wise, engrossing, educational, thrilling, deeply satisfying, Every line in every poem is a surprise at the same time that it is absolutely appropriate in its place. Ms. Stone's command of her language is absolute, and absolutely pleasing to see and hear. Her vocabulary is huge, her range of knowledge no less so.

I can't present a favorite poem or favorite line: this is a stanza chosen literally at random:

Here Bruegel offers us
grain as allegory, as a rich
bullion load of light under
a sapphirine, Netherlandish sky,

and the next continues

his clever corruscation
he sets burning on hillsides

and proceeds. Trust me, this level of intensity does not diminish anywhere in the book. The language throughout is this rich, the perceptions this sharp, and their communication. Here are a few more phrases, again chosen at random: "...who is filling up, like these rooms /with music, from the inside out," "a ransom's weight of welted fox," "or unctuously unclothed," and "brains empty as clapperless bells." In the context of their poems, in the context of this book, these lines dazzle a first reading, and after several readings.

The lines from the stanza above come from the third section of the book, which are responses to works of art, ekphrastic poems. The second section relates various aspects of lives' endings, but characteristically in totally original ways. The first section, in which the poet warms up, loosens her muscles as it were, holds meditations on words, for example, "Incarnadine," "Yes," "Maybe," and relates straightforwardly, but characteristically with great originality, thoughts on cows, wild onions, a young man's forthcoming marriage, late love, and, as a surprise, an address "To the Men I Never Slept With," the only poem in the book where "I" appears.

Ms. Stone is a master craftsperson, as I've said. Fans of form will find a triolet clearly labeled, and will easily recognize at least one sonnet, a villanelle, and a pantoum.

Just when you think Myrna Stone can't write poems any better, her new
book HOW ELSE TO LOVE THE WORLD puts that notion to rest.Her keen sense
of form, unlike so many poets of that style who are cold as ice,launches
her poems of wit, intelligence and eroticism--the precision always human
and often beautiful.This book is a must for your Myrna Stone collection.
If you haven't started your collecting, by all means do so, now--it will
be one of your best investments.Let Myrna have the last word:here's her
title poem:

How Else to Love the World


How else to love the world but rise
each morning from the bed of your making

into the addle and dross the hours devise.
How else to love the world but to rise

as though order is the ardor that drives
this life between waking and waking.

How else to love the world but to rise
each morning from the bed of your making.