Hardcover
-
SHIP THIS ITEMChoose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Friday, March 22PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
When asked whether poets improve with age Ruth Stone, 89, replied: “There’s no question. If your brain goes on and on, as it should under normal conditions, there’s more in it and your writing will get more profound.”
Year after year, Ruth Stone’s poems turn ever more penetrating. Fresh from her National Book Award, this prophetic new book is filled with winter, fractals, and passionate aging:
From “What is a Poem?”:
Having come this far with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.
Science, politics, art, and fellow small-town citizens all play pivotal roles in her poems. From the cilia in the ear of an owl to cheap paint peeling off the walls, Ruth Stone presents a world dissected and revealed:
From “The Driveway”:
Asphalt is a kind of urban lava flow that creeps from plot to plot along a street;
affluent, weedless, slow, and cancerous;
pressure from the magma populace for easy maintenance; neat status-symbolic,
easy to wash with the garden hose.
“Her poems startle us over and over,” Galway Kinnell said when presenting Stone the Wallace Stevens Award, “with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness . . . the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.”
Ruth Stone is the author of nine books of poetry. She is the recipient of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Award (with which she bought plumbing for her house) and two Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which roofed her house). After her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. For twenty years she taught creative writing at many universities, finally settling at Binghamton University. Today, Ruth Stone lives in Vermont.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781556592102 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
Publication date: | 09/01/2004 |
Pages: | 128 |
Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Goshen, Vermont and Binghamton, New YorkDate of Birth:
June 8, 1915Place of Birth:
Roanoke, VirginiaEducation:
University of Illinois (no degree); B.A., Radcliffe Institute of Independent Study at Harvard UniversityTable of Contents
Accepting | 3 | |
Another Day | 4 | |
Another Feeling | 5 | |
Full Moon | 6 | |
An Imprint of the Roaring Twenties | 7 | |
Becoming Vegetarian | 9 | |
Bennington Bus Stop | 10 | |
Body Language | 11 | |
Bianca | 12 | |
Walter, Upon Looking Around | 13 | |
Between Men | 14 | |
A Male Tale | 15 | |
Calibrate | 16 | |
Clay | 17 | |
Cause and Effect | 18 | |
Chausible Plausible | 19 | |
Border | 20 | |
Am I | 21 | |
Consider This | 23 | |
Almost the Same | 24 | |
Currents | 25 | |
Fragrance | 26 | |
Always Icarus | 27 | |
Elsie's Brooks | 28 | |
Eta Carinae | 29 | |
So | 30 | |
And So Forth | 31 | |
Cosmos | 33 | |
Exotic Extras for Reading at City College | 34 | |
Riding the Bubble | 36 | |
Floaters | 37 | |
From Outer Space | 38 | |
The Self and the Universe | 39 | |
Heaven | 40 | |
Fear of the Doppelganger | 41 | |
Ice | 42 | |
How Can I? | 43 | |
I Walk Alone | 44 | |
In the Arts | 45 | |
In the Free World | 46 | |
Infrared | 47 | |
Inner Truth | 48 | |
Leap from a Footnote | 49 | |
Interim | 51 | |
Blizzard | 52 | |
Drought Again | 55 | |
Euphoria | 56 | |
Writer's Block | 57 | |
Clotheslines | 58 | |
Living in the Past | 59 | |
Margaret Street | 61 | |
Man on the Ice | 62 | |
March 2003 | 63 | |
What Is a Poem? | 64 | |
Menty Ears Ago | 65 | |
My Mother's Phlox | 66 | |
The Wailing Wall | 68 | |
On the Dangerous Way | 69 | |
Negative | 70 | |
On the Outer Banks | 71 | |
Pamphlet for Bullfrogs | 72 | |
Pigs in Crisis | 73 | |
Praise | 76 | |
Mindless | 77 | |
Pulsing | 78 | |
Shark | 79 | |
Spin | 80 | |
The Driveway | 81 | |
Laguna | 82 | |
Storage | 83 | |
That's Not Me | 84 | |
Tell Me | 86 | |
The Apex | 87 | |
The Barrier | 88 | |
The Gift from Isfahan | 89 | |
The Jewels | 90 | |
The Laying Down | 91 | |
Orbits | 92 | |
The Leaf | 93 | |
The Old Story | 94 | |
The Sadness of Lies | 95 | |
Progress as Reported | 96 | |
This Is What I Think | 97 | |
This Day Brings a Slight Poem | 99 | |
This Is How It Is | 100 | |
Tools of the Psyche | 101 | |
Trying to Write | 103 | |
Visions | 104 | |
Weathering | 105 | |
What She Said | 106 | |
Whither Weather | 107 | |
What They Don't Tell Us About | 108 | |
The Message | 109 | |
The Cave | 110 | |
About the Author | 113 |