What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems

New
Paperback
2009
$15.37

Ruth Stone once said, 'I decided very early on not to write like other people.' What Love Comes to shows the fruits of this resolve in the lifetime's work of a true American original. The winner of the National Book Award at the age of 87, Ruth Stone is still writing extraordinary poetry well into her 90s. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce feminist and political poems, and meditations on her husband's suicide, on love, loss, blindness and aging. What Love Comes to opens up her own particular world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance. The book has a foreword by Sharon Olds, who 'had the joy of meeting Ruth Stone' as a teenager, a later encounter giving her 'a vision of a genius at work': 'Ruth Stone's poems are mysterious, hilarious, powerful. They are understandable, often with a very clear surface, but not simple - their intelligence is crackling and complex - She is a poet of great humor - mockery even - and a bold eye, not obedient. There is also disrespect in her poems, a taken freedom, that feels to me like a strength of the disenfranchised. Ruth's poems are direct and lissome, her plainness is elegant and shapely, her music is basic, classical: it feels as real as the movement of matter. When we hear a Stone first line, it is as if we have been hearing this voice in our head all day, and just now the words become audible. She is a seer, easily speaking clear truths somehow unmentioned until now - She has a tragic deadpan humor: love and destruction are right next to each other - Ruth Stone's poems, in their originality and radiance, their intelligence and music and intense personal politics, shine in their place within her generation, among the pioneering women (Bishop, Brooks, Rukeyser) - Ruth Stone's poems are the food the spirit craves.'

Synopsis

Ruth Stone once said, 'I decided very early on not to write like other people.' What Love Comes to shows the fruits of this resolve in the lifetime's work of a true American original. The winner of the National Book Award at the age of 87, Ruth Stone is still writing extraordinary poetry well into her 90s. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce feminist and political poems, and meditations on her husband's suicide, on love, loss, blindness and aging. What Love Comes to opens up her own particular world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance. The book has a foreword by Sharon Olds, who 'had the joy of meeting Ruth Stone' as a teenager, a later encounter giving her 'a vision of a genius at work': 'Ruth Stone's poems are mysterious, hilarious, powerful. They are understandable, often with a very clear surface, but not simple - their intelligence is crackling and complex - She is a poet of great humor - mockery even - and a bold eye, not obedient. There is also disrespect in her poems, a taken freedom, that feels to me like a strength of the disenfranchised. Ruth's poems are direct and lissome, her plainness is elegant and shapely, her music is basic, classical: it feels as real as the movement of matter. When we hear a Stone first line, it is as if we have been hearing this voice in our head all day, and just now the words become audible. She is a seer, easily speaking clear truths somehow unmentioned until now - She has a tragic deadpan humor: love and destruction are right next to each other - Ruth Stone's poems, in their originality and radiance, their intelligence and music and intense personal politics, shine in their place within her generation, among the pioneering women (Bishop, Brooks, Rukeyser) - Ruth Stone's poems are the food the spirit craves.'

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published: 10 Apr 2009
ISBN 10: 1852248416
ISBN 13: 9781852248413

Media Reviews

'Her 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' - GALWAY KINNELL.

Author Bio

Ruth Stone was born in Virginia in 1915, and has lived in rural Vermont for much of her life. In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she had to raise three daughters alone, all the time writing what she called her 'love poems, all written to a dead man' who forced her to 'reside in limbo' with her daughters. For 20 years she travelled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities. A greatly loved teacher, she was still working into her 80s. She has won many awards and honours, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Whiting Award (with which she bought plumbing for her house), two Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which roofed the house), the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award.