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In the Dark
“An aging poet’s failing eyesight informs this collection . . . some of which recall the spirit of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Dark but not hopeless, they spring from Stone’s lucid inner vision, which is straightforward, musical, and defiant.”— Utne
Now available in paperback, In the Dark, winner of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, is Ruth Stone’s follow-up to her National Book Award--winning In the Next Galaxy. Personal issues of memory, aging, and loss are balanced against profound political and cultural change. Stone has been called a “people’s poet” whose work is “profoundly rewarding,” and she writes a poetry of everyday life that recasts the mundane as indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age, Stone, then eighty-nine, “There’s no question.”
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.
Now available in paperback, In the Dark, winner of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, is Ruth Stone’s follow-up to her National Book Award--winning In the Next Galaxy. Personal issues of memory, aging, and loss are balanced against profound political and cultural change. Stone has been called a “people’s poet” whose work is “profoundly rewarding,” and she writes a poetry of everyday life that recasts the mundane as indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age, Stone, then eighty-nine, “There’s no question.”
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.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
4 people are currently reading
63 people want to read
About the author
Ruth Stone
37 books68 followersRuth Stone was an American poet and author of thirteen books of poetry. She received the 2002 National Book Award (for her collection In the Next Galaxy), the 2002 Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, a Whiting Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award. In July 2007, she was named poet laureate of Vermont.
After her husband committed suicide in 1959, Stone was forced to raise her three daughters alone as she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at State University of New York Binghamton.
She died at her home in Ripton, Vermont, in 2011. She was 96 years old.
After her husband committed suicide in 1959, Stone was forced to raise her three daughters alone as she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at State University of New York Binghamton.
She died at her home in Ripton, Vermont, in 2011. She was 96 years old.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 29, 2018
I had forgotten how good Ruth Stone is because it's been so long since I've seen her read. This collection is a wonderful compilation of poems that mainly deal with the end of life and the feeling of loss.
Stone has some beautiful lines and a gift for the subtle use of sound and rhythmic techniques. Her images are both unusual and moving, as this, poem (my favorite), "Interim," shows:
Interim
Like the radiator that sits
in the kitchen passing gas;
like the mop with its head
on the floor, weeping;
or the poinsettia that pretends
its leaves are flowers;
the cheap paint peels
off the steamed walls.
When you have nothing to say,
the sadness of things
speaks for you.
Stone eschews sentimentality for real feeling, and the fact that many of them are quite short shows just how much she can pack into a small space. This is definitely a collection of Stone's I'll find myself thumbing through frequently.
Stone has some beautiful lines and a gift for the subtle use of sound and rhythmic techniques. Her images are both unusual and moving, as this, poem (my favorite), "Interim," shows:
Interim
Like the radiator that sits
in the kitchen passing gas;
like the mop with its head
on the floor, weeping;
or the poinsettia that pretends
its leaves are flowers;
the cheap paint peels
off the steamed walls.
When you have nothing to say,
the sadness of things
speaks for you.
Stone eschews sentimentality for real feeling, and the fact that many of them are quite short shows just how much she can pack into a small space. This is definitely a collection of Stone's I'll find myself thumbing through frequently.
January 19, 2022
Accepting
Half-blind, it is always twilight,
The dusk of my time and the nights
are so long, and the days of my tribe
flash by, their many-coloured cars
choking the air, and I lie like a sash
on my divan in this 21st century
mosque, indifferent to my folded
flesh that falls in on itself,
almost inert, remembering crossing
the fields, turning corners, coming
home to the lighted windows,
the pedestrian years of it, accepting
from each hand the gift,
without knowing why they were
given or what to make of them.
* * *
Another Day
The fleeting high that lifts you
at six AM after a cup of coffee;
or is it that you've lived into another day?
After the sun sets and you look out there
on the dark that is neither down nor up,
not even the patterns of stars can tell you where.
Still, light comes and lies on your skin
like the membrane of a delicate egg.
You do not need to feel anything,
enclosed in this sac: etched lineage,
ball of twine, fractal of lost feathers.
* * *
Becoming Vegetarian
Slowly I am pulling my teeth.
Now I am only drinking water.
You grass eaters with two stomachs,
let me be a stippled shadow
where you lie down, your sweet breath
unlike the sulfur of volcanoes.
I came devouring my mother.
Now I drip tears like icicles in March.
I push my cart of rags crying, "No carrion."
* * *
Bennington Bus Stop
She gets off the bus and they kiss.
It's a hard embrace.
Then he walks on the balls of his feet
like a basketball star,
and contorts himself into the driver's
seat of a compact car.
She stands outside,
averts her face,
wipes her lips with the back of her hand
as if to erase a smear,
or a breath of dust on a photograph
album stacked in the future.
Then she slips into her place
beside him and everything is sure
as the weekend, as sure
as their nineteen-year-old bodies,
as sure as death
that sweetens their given grace.
* * *
Walter, Upon Looking Around
"Men are getting extinct,"
says my grandson. Walter.
"Look how little I am;
and I'm the only boy in the family.
I hardly even see a boy,"
he says, warming to his subject.
* * *
Calibrate
How happy am I
to apply
this brief kiss,
or can I say,
today I am a woman,
perhaps clay,
perhaps human.
Rushing along the galaxy,
this string bag of puzzles.
To make matters worse,
I'm happy.
Calibrate:
A veil of wet snow,
a diffuse sun,
there are the planks of the porch,
there is the wooden rail,
there are the willow whips
like Desdemona's hair,
or Lear's blind tears
beyond recall.
* * *
Clay
Tuesday and I am still in the coils
of this serpent masking as a vein.
It has swallowed so much. I am the half-
swallowed toad still kicking in the throat.
It's like I walk to the end of the world
and come to a wall. There is no top of the wall.
It goes up forever. My body adds itself to the bricks.
* * *
Cause and Effect
Once a stick who was tired
of being beaten against everything
lay down on the fagot pile
"Let me ascend to heaven," it snarled.
Presently wood smoke rose
from the poet's chimney.
* * *
Chausible Plausible
The souls of your feet are saints
of coarse calloused rough weave,
the mock piety of the absurd.
"Here," you shout down to them.
"Pray get on with it."
They move, after a pause.
The electric message relayed
from the altar, as it were;
where you voice echoes
in the chambers and vaults
under the Art Nouveau stained glass
windows of your vested self.
* * *
Cosmos
Let me speak as a grasshopper to the universe,
rebounding, always rebounding.
Where do we leap,
old mother?
The air is filled with your progeny.
The dissolving suns
what scars they cut,
and yet, the ones that blew apart were gathered in
like spider's silk.
What is this speech, this blind fingering of the dark?
Nothing, old mother,
but your wasted breath.
* * *
Heaven
Before we knew the true
polyhedral vision
and reduced all possibility
to a perfectly fulfillable eternity;
ignoring hung
like a bat of viscous glue;
upside down -
beautiful blind intersection.
* * *
How Can I?
Saying it over and over,
the eyes forget
the subtle alphabet,
or calligraphy,
the sweet nuances of style,
and fall to hieroglyphics.
And the body, asleep,
walks along the Nile
planting papyrus,
a basket to catch words;
the feet caked with dust,
the poor thighs heavy,
and the entire torso squat,
not anyone you would remember.
And yet,
far away, lying on a foam mat,
the blind self thinks
how can I live like this?
* * *
I Walk Alone
Along the street at night,
sometimes the rain;
its bodiless déjà vu,
random street,
the rain's velvet scrim.
Almost the whisper of your voice,
as I remember
your elegant fingers
in the flare of a match
as we paused on the edge
of that illusion
that now rises from the dead,
that returns years from then
without warning,
or this dark street
where I stand transfixed,
embraced, but only by the wind.
* * *
What Is a Poem?
Such slight changes in air pressure,
tongue and palate,
and the differences in teeth.
Transparent words.
Why do I want to say ochre,
or what is green-yellow?
The sisters of those leaves on the ground
still lisp on the branches.
Why do I want to imitate them?
Having come this far
with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.
Half-blind, it is always twilight,
The dusk of my time and the nights
are so long, and the days of my tribe
flash by, their many-coloured cars
choking the air, and I lie like a sash
on my divan in this 21st century
mosque, indifferent to my folded
flesh that falls in on itself,
almost inert, remembering crossing
the fields, turning corners, coming
home to the lighted windows,
the pedestrian years of it, accepting
from each hand the gift,
without knowing why they were
given or what to make of them.
* * *
Another Day
The fleeting high that lifts you
at six AM after a cup of coffee;
or is it that you've lived into another day?
After the sun sets and you look out there
on the dark that is neither down nor up,
not even the patterns of stars can tell you where.
Still, light comes and lies on your skin
like the membrane of a delicate egg.
You do not need to feel anything,
enclosed in this sac: etched lineage,
ball of twine, fractal of lost feathers.
* * *
Becoming Vegetarian
Slowly I am pulling my teeth.
Now I am only drinking water.
You grass eaters with two stomachs,
let me be a stippled shadow
where you lie down, your sweet breath
unlike the sulfur of volcanoes.
I came devouring my mother.
Now I drip tears like icicles in March.
I push my cart of rags crying, "No carrion."
* * *
Bennington Bus Stop
She gets off the bus and they kiss.
It's a hard embrace.
Then he walks on the balls of his feet
like a basketball star,
and contorts himself into the driver's
seat of a compact car.
She stands outside,
averts her face,
wipes her lips with the back of her hand
as if to erase a smear,
or a breath of dust on a photograph
album stacked in the future.
Then she slips into her place
beside him and everything is sure
as the weekend, as sure
as their nineteen-year-old bodies,
as sure as death
that sweetens their given grace.
* * *
Walter, Upon Looking Around
"Men are getting extinct,"
says my grandson. Walter.
"Look how little I am;
and I'm the only boy in the family.
I hardly even see a boy,"
he says, warming to his subject.
* * *
Calibrate
How happy am I
to apply
this brief kiss,
or can I say,
today I am a woman,
perhaps clay,
perhaps human.
Rushing along the galaxy,
this string bag of puzzles.
To make matters worse,
I'm happy.
Calibrate:
A veil of wet snow,
a diffuse sun,
there are the planks of the porch,
there is the wooden rail,
there are the willow whips
like Desdemona's hair,
or Lear's blind tears
beyond recall.
* * *
Clay
Tuesday and I am still in the coils
of this serpent masking as a vein.
It has swallowed so much. I am the half-
swallowed toad still kicking in the throat.
It's like I walk to the end of the world
and come to a wall. There is no top of the wall.
It goes up forever. My body adds itself to the bricks.
* * *
Cause and Effect
Once a stick who was tired
of being beaten against everything
lay down on the fagot pile
"Let me ascend to heaven," it snarled.
Presently wood smoke rose
from the poet's chimney.
* * *
Chausible Plausible
The souls of your feet are saints
of coarse calloused rough weave,
the mock piety of the absurd.
"Here," you shout down to them.
"Pray get on with it."
They move, after a pause.
The electric message relayed
from the altar, as it were;
where you voice echoes
in the chambers and vaults
under the Art Nouveau stained glass
windows of your vested self.
* * *
Cosmos
Let me speak as a grasshopper to the universe,
rebounding, always rebounding.
Where do we leap,
old mother?
The air is filled with your progeny.
The dissolving suns
what scars they cut,
and yet, the ones that blew apart were gathered in
like spider's silk.
What is this speech, this blind fingering of the dark?
Nothing, old mother,
but your wasted breath.
* * *
Heaven
Before we knew the true
polyhedral vision
and reduced all possibility
to a perfectly fulfillable eternity;
ignoring hung
like a bat of viscous glue;
upside down -
beautiful blind intersection.
* * *
How Can I?
Saying it over and over,
the eyes forget
the subtle alphabet,
or calligraphy,
the sweet nuances of style,
and fall to hieroglyphics.
And the body, asleep,
walks along the Nile
planting papyrus,
a basket to catch words;
the feet caked with dust,
the poor thighs heavy,
and the entire torso squat,
not anyone you would remember.
And yet,
far away, lying on a foam mat,
the blind self thinks
how can I live like this?
* * *
I Walk Alone
Along the street at night,
sometimes the rain;
its bodiless déjà vu,
random street,
the rain's velvet scrim.
Almost the whisper of your voice,
as I remember
your elegant fingers
in the flare of a match
as we paused on the edge
of that illusion
that now rises from the dead,
that returns years from then
without warning,
or this dark street
where I stand transfixed,
embraced, but only by the wind.
* * *
What Is a Poem?
Such slight changes in air pressure,
tongue and palate,
and the differences in teeth.
Transparent words.
Why do I want to say ochre,
or what is green-yellow?
The sisters of those leaves on the ground
still lisp on the branches.
Why do I want to imitate them?
Having come this far
with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.
April 15, 2020
I've been a fan of Ruth Stone's poems since reading _Second Hand Coat_: her images, her direct yet often startling observations about sometimes the most commonplace settings. Though this collection feels more uneven than the stunning _In the Next Galaxy_, it's still loaded with arresting lines, images, poems. Her poem "The Self and the Universe" starts out "This is not poetic language,/ but it is the language of poetry." I'd say there is often poetic language but the real pleasure in reading her work is to appreciate her direct and multifaceted engagement with the world: sometimes sad but often witty with the kind of wit that arises from the long view of a lifetime of experience.
Some of my favorites in this book are "The Wailing Wall," "Negative," "Pulsing," and "Drought Again, "Interim," "Inner Truth," and "Leap from a Footnote."
The rocks are secret as potatoes.
They squint in their gum-dirt sockets
["Drought Again"]
_____
The patient holds her pocketbook stuffed with toiletries
from the hospital bed stand. She stares
for a long hypnotic moment at the enamel nose of a male urinal.
["Body Language"]
_____
It's like I walk to the end of the world
and come to a wall. There is no top to the wall.
It goes up forever. My body adds itself to the bricks.
["Clay"]
Some of my favorites in this book are "The Wailing Wall," "Negative," "Pulsing," and "Drought Again, "Interim," "Inner Truth," and "Leap from a Footnote."
The rocks are secret as potatoes.
They squint in their gum-dirt sockets
["Drought Again"]
_____
The patient holds her pocketbook stuffed with toiletries
from the hospital bed stand. She stares
for a long hypnotic moment at the enamel nose of a male urinal.
["Body Language"]
_____
It's like I walk to the end of the world
and come to a wall. There is no top to the wall.
It goes up forever. My body adds itself to the bricks.
["Clay"]
April 9, 2020
3.5⭐️ I found the collection inconsistent. I couldn’t track the voice. Some of Stone’s work is lovely. The whole doesn’t hang in a well-balanced way.
August 20, 2007
A very strong showing from a poet who went blind shortly before putting this collection together. I'm amazed at her sense of the line, how perfect it is, how she knows, intuitively, when to break. As Roethke said: "Make every line a poem." This book follows In The Next Galaxy, and is only slightly it's lesser. Both, to me, seem the beginning of a new aesthetic for Stone. Not that her poems have radically changed, or her tone, and definitely not her always careful subject matter, but rather her sensibility as a poet, as a woman--not to say at the end of her life--but one who has lived a long time.
August 1, 2009
There were some great images and lines in these poems- two of my favorites are What is a Poem? and Interim- but there were also a lot of things that sounded good on the surface but didn't make sense when you thought about them. Still, I did find myself flipping back and forth, revisiting certain poems, rereading specific lines that I had liked, so I think I'll be looking out for more poetry by Stone.
June 25, 2015
There was a wide variety of topics and commentary included in this collection. Some I thoroughly enjoyed, while others were musings that left me feeling nothing. The poet had the ability to look at mundane objects or occurrences and turn them into beautiful words, the occasional line drawing me back to reread and reimagine something I had never given thought to.
January 11, 2012
One of Stone's strongest books, direct, musical, on another plane. I love her poems and so sad when she recently passed away. She lives quite near me and I almost made a pilgrimage up the coast to see her. Wish I had!
Read
January 17, 2020Stone's phenomenal, dark, richly-textured poetry provides a sumptuous and nuanced repast for the reader's imagination.
January 20, 2013
From Chard DeNiord's presentation, Oct. 2012
December 4, 2013
good book
October 20, 2014
Still one of my favorite poets.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews