Simplicity

by Ruth Stone

Overview

Poetry by Ruth Stone, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

Expansive, lyrical, and groundbreaking poetry by Ruth Stone, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780963818317
Publisher:	Paris Press
Publication date:	01/01/1996
Series:	Paris Press
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Ruth Stone is the author of 13 books of poetry, for which she has received the National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Shelley Memorial Award. She taught creative writing at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. She lived in Vermont until her death in 2011.

Hometown:

Goshen, Vermont and Binghamton, New York

Date of Birth:

June 8, 1915

Place of Birth:

Roanoke, Virginia

Education:

University of Illinois (no degree); B.A., Radcliffe Institute of Independent Study at Harvard University

What People are Saying About This

Willis Barnstone

“Around Ruth Stone's profound, passionate, lucid, and funny poems is a benign silence. Though her listeners and readers are legendary, America's Anna Akhmatova remains a solitary mountain tree, removed from the business of American poetry, the secret great poet of the English language. Let's not worry why at eighty she is';t immediately known as our living T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, or Elizabeth Bishop. Rather let us atone by reading, hearing, and absorbing the irridescence of her poems in Simplicity. Then literary history will laugh at our belated recognition and wisdom.”

From the Publisher

"Around Ruth Stone's profound, passionate, lucid, and funny poems is a benign silence. Though her listeners and readers are legendary, America's Anna Akhmatova remains a solitary mountain tree, removed from the business of American poetry, the secret great poet of the English language. Let's not worry why at eighty she is';t immediately known as our living T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, or Elizabeth Bishop. Rather let us atone by reading, hearing, and absorbing the irridescence of her poems in Simplicity. Then literary history will laugh at our belated recognition and wisdom."—Willis Barnstone

Editorial Reviews

"Stone's work is alternately witty, bawdy, touching, and profound. But never pompous. Her honesty and originality give her writing a sense of youth and newness because she looks at the world so clearly, without all the detritus of social convention the rest of us pick up along the way.... Her writing proves her to be simply inspired."—USA Today

"By turns sly, subtle, exuberant, poignant, bawdy and bitter, and always unflinchingly hones, Ruth Stone's Simplicity is anything but simple. In poems of daring and complexity, Stone tells the truths of love and grief, examines the politics of past and future, plunges through Einstein's cosmos. She is one of poetry's wise women, one of our age's fiercest, purest, most original poets."—Sandra M. Gilbert

"Ruth Stone's seeing eye is clear, her voice as complex and simple as life is. Like the woman in her poems, she has gone deep and brought back a message. Listen."—Lucille Clifton

"Stone's work is alternately witty, bawdy, touching, and profound. But never pompous. Her honesty and originality give her writing a sense of youth and newness because she looks at the world so clearly, without all the detritus of social convention the rest of us pick up along the way. Her writing proves her to be simply inspired."—USA Today

"Simplicity, Ruth Stone's tenth book, is deceptive in title and appearance — its cool blue cover — since it is a wild, wide book haunted by what William James calls the 'buzzing, blooming' of life, and all its ghosts; the voice of neighbors and highways, photons, fields of corn (I ear what you say). Sperm and egg converse, as does a dead husband... She has a wicked sense of humor, about poetry: 'A bulletin from the poetry factory says/ we like our images stuck on with mortician's was' and about people, herself included.There is also great beauty in this collection, and a brilliance of imagery that comes from seeing the world freshly and clearly: '. An empty parking lot/ passive as the hide of a sleeping amoeba,' 'a June flush of leaves and wild mustard.' Above all, Stone's poetry speaks about and on behalf of love, which marries particles, photons, neutrons, the smallest particles alive, moving and connected. 'Love also takes its shape/ from climate,/ the workhorse of the world;/ and yet, so delicate.'"—THE BOSTON GLOBE

From the Publisher