Customer Reviews

In the Next Galaxy

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After reading Ruth Stone's "In the Next Galaxy" I was reminded of the cinematography of the Eames brothers - specifically their film, "Powers of Ten," where the camera manages to convey in a minimum of frames just how far out into space or how far down into atomic structure the images change by following multiples of ten. Indeed, here is Ruth Stone looking upward and transforming some wind-whipped trash and a squadron of crows into "...the gaity of flying paper/and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds." Hers is a vital creative vision that makes magic within the imagery of a poem and an alchemy takes place. As the Eames lens went from outer space into the orbits of electrons, Ruth Stone follows wooden piles that are "...driven deep into the sand (and) are at last exposed,/ Their thin bones fragile as tiny star fish." Here is poetry that lures us out to swim through the senses, but never allows us to drown in the mere voluptuousness of the universe. There is inevitably a cool intellectual awareness that suddenly pulls us out on to the shore of consciousness where we, the readers, all lie chilled on the sand talking to ourselves in simple banalities, saying "Oh, my God. That's beautiful. How did she EVER think to compare those....?" But, then you realize the sun is down, you're alone on the beach, and it's time to go in.
Burgess Needle, Retired Tucson Librarian and Former co-director of The Southern Arizona Writing Project

From Inside BU: A few weeks after winning the National Book Award, poet Ruth Stone, Bartle emerita professor of English, has won the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Prize. Given annually, the $150,000 award, which was announced December 23, recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Stone, 87, said she was "stunned, humbled and made jubilant" by the recognition. In explaining why the committee chose Stone, former Vermont Poet Laureate Galway Kinnell, one of the prize's five judges, wrote: "Ruth Stone's 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. Her poems are experiences, not the record of experiences. They are events, interactions between the poet and the world. They happen - there on the page before us and within us - surprising and inevitable."

...Ruth Stone is to English. In The Next Galary is yet another compendium of crackling wit, interrogating history from the vantage point of an aging (and impoverished?) woman -- Ruth is 86. Fluffy love poetry is not high on Stone's agenda, this is razor sharp and yet misleadingly simple, almost conversational, compilation of heavy themes wrapped in very light poems.

If you have a thing for poetry and haven't yet read Ruth Stone, this is as good a place to start as any. If you have read her already, this review is meaningless, you already know you ought to get this anthology too.

Here are some lines of Ruth Stone's poetry I liked. The first example is from the poem 'Wanting'.

To want is to believe
there is something worth getting
Whereas gettig only show
worthless the thing is.
And this is why destruction
is so useful.
It gets rid of what was wanted
and so makes room
for more to be wanted.

And this is from the poem I most liked in this collection, "Shapes"

In 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, overwhemled
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.

There is a plainness and straighforwardness in this voice, a clarity of surface which makes the poems readable and understandable.
But there is not something which I look for in the work of every poet I read, and find in very few i.e. lines which make me want to hold them in my mind forever, to make them my own and part of my personal world. But that is my feeling and my guess is others feel differently about the lines of this fine poet.

The problem for a person who loves literature and particularly poetry is that there is so much out there, published by small and large presses all over the country. The most consistently good poetry come from the LSU press. But how do you find a good poet: reading a a couple of poems published in this review or this journal or whatever doesn't give you enough to go on--unless you stumble on something akin to Keats's On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer (then you know you have something), but that simply doesn' happen. Anyway, Ruth Stone is an east coast versifier, average (very average) and not worthy of the acclaim she has received. I read this entire book and was so exhausted by its underwhelming lack of substance, insight, good word choice etc. What a waste of ink. And to think Betty Adcock is not receiving awards and this Ms.Stone is. As I said, there is so much poetry out there--bland, political, grating, lacking any sense of music or rhythm and so forgettable that your telephone bill is Beethoven's Fifth by comparison. I am not a curmudgeon: I like Cathy Smith Bowers, Robert Wrigley, Fred Chappell and of more established poets my favorite, and the best in the last 60 years except for Hill, Elizabeth Bishop (Robert Lowell in a few poems), basil Bunting, Edgar Bowers, Geoffrey Hill (the best poet since Yeats--perhaps better), bEtty Adcock. Ruth Stone, like Amy Clampitt, has a superficial appeal but why not go back and read Yeats and Frost. Not worth a moment's notice is Miss Stone.