Ordinary Words [Paperback]

Ruth Stone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2000

Ordinary Words celebrates Ruth Stone’s 84th birthday. This brilliant new collection is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Eric Mathieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. Ordinary Words captures a unique vision of “Americana” marked by Stone’s characteristic wit, poignancy, and lyricism. The poet addresses the environment, poverty, and aging with fearless candor and surprising humor.

Sister poet to Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Syzmborska, Ruth Stone offers a view of her country and its citizens that is tender and wacky, filled with hard political truths as well as love, beauty, cruelty, and sorrow. Ruth Stone is a poet of the people, and poet’s poet. Her following is devoted and ever-growing. Ordinary Words shows that poetry is about everyday life, our life. Poems are set in Rutland, Vermont; Indianapolis; Chattanooga; Houston; Boise; and Troy, New York (where celluloid collars were made). Stone’s subjects are trailer parks, state parks, prefab houses, school crossing guards, bears, snakes, hummingbirds, bottled water, Aunt Maud, Uncle Cal, lost love, dry humping at the Greyhound bus terminal, and McDonald’s as a refuge from loneliness. Her heroes are dead husbands, wild grandmothers, struggling daughters: ordinary Americans leading simple and extraordinary lives.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"You think it horrible that lust and rage / Should dance attention upon my old age," wrote W.B. Yeats in one of his many, memorable testimonies on behalf of eternal youth. At 85, Ruth Stone has refrained (as far as I know) from the sort of chemical fixes and elixirs that intrigued her Irish predecessor. But she too has remained open to eros and anger, despair and delight, and steadfastly avoided the sort of golden-hued nostalgia that has ruined many an older poet.

Ordinary Words, which won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award, is an excellent specimen of Stone's art. She has a superb eye for landscape, noting both the beauty of the natural world and the dispiriting thumbprints that human beings leave behind: "As now, another snowfall / sculptures an unreality, clean and fresh, / bringing down in its light crystals / industrial particulates as it settles." This note of ecological protest, here subsumed in Latinate playfulness, can sometimes mar Stone's poetry, and the same thing might be said of her mini-manifesto against consumer culture, "Incredible Buys In." She's much stronger when delving less deliberately into what she calls "that vast / confused library, the female mind." Over and over she emerges with astonishing prizes, from the dizzy imagery of "Prefab" to the stirring snapshot of bereavement in "Then":

In our loss we accepted the strange shape of things
as though it had meaning for us,
as though we moved slowly over the acreage,
as though the ground modulated like water.
The floors and the cupboards slanted to the West,
the house sinking toward the evening side of the sky.
The children and I sitting together waiting,
there on the back porch, the massive engine
of the storm swelling up through the undergrowth,
pounding toward us.

Despite the damp fizzle of the final line, this gets right to the heart of our sorrowing, queasy communion with the dead. And it confirms that when Ruth Stone hits her stride, as she often does throughout this collection, the words that she deploys with such low-key panache are anything but ordinary. --James Marcus --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In the now abandoned race to find the next Virginia Hamilton Adair, one might have overlooked Stone, who, with 10 other books and numerous awards, has been here all along. Her 11th, with its unprepossessing title, is well worth discovering, consistent and forthright in its explorations of the quotidian and the dream-life it can produce. Writing of "this sly shadow of too much knowing," the poet takes us through "cities scattered like a deal of cards/...As I run on miraculous hooves/ from the wooden pen. As I run/ through the market street squealing.// This glaze of vision fragmented,/ confetti caught in the updraft;/ dark photograph of the penumbra." If poems like "1941" (about an interracial dalliance) don't quite find the tense language they seek, others are studded with socio-political zingers: "My middle-class beauty, testing itself,/ discovered the dull dregs of ordinary marriage." Stone often writes as aging observer, commenting wrly on a boring, line-up-at-the-counter existence; she laments the past's inability to break its frame-or her own inability to keep her late middle-aged daughters ("in over their hips") from falling into it. But Stone's other characters, with a contagious hope, look out with "worn eyes/ and see the bright new Pleiades." The ordinary, for Stone, turns out to be more than enough. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Paris Press (February 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0963818384
• ISBN-13: 978-0963818386
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,737,028 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Choice!, May 6, 2000

By 

Tara Bray - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ordinary Words (Hardcover)

Ruth Stone writes poems about the real, never striking a pose, but simply recording the world with integrity and a keen eye. Her poems "in their desire, praise emptiness, spirit." Whether her poems consider sitting in a McDonald's listening to the conversations of those around her, living through the passions of motherhood or expressing the deepest human losses, the reader begins to feel part of the experience. There are always two forces pulling against each other in this work. In relation to this book, I will quote two lines from her first poem: "'Here,' says the Devil, / 'Eat. It's Paradise.'"