In the Next Galaxy

by Ruth Stone

“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 on presenting the Wallace Stevens Award

“In the Next Galaxy gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her ’80s, fully inhabiting body and mind.”—National Book Award Judges’ statement

“Compassionate, comic, feminist and horrified by injustice, Stone’s poems are composed with an accessible deftness.”—The Oregonian

Ruth Stone has earned nearly every major literary award for her poetry. She taught at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. Today she lives in Vermont.

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2002

About the author

Ruth 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.

Reviews

[Ken]

Over the weekend, I was staying at a bed & breakfast in Vermont (motto: "Keep Vermont green. Bring money."). I brought along the ample complete collection of Wislawa Szymborska to finish, only I woke at 4:30 Saturday morning, got up, went down to the library, and polished it off with the coming of Vermont dawn. Now without a book of my own, I explored the shelves of the B&B's rather impressive library. There I found a collection by a poet I did not know: In the Next Galaxy by Ruth Stone. She was there because she was a Vermont poet, only recently dead after some 90 years on the planet. What a find it was! As I had to put it back once we left, I cannot quote it, but she wrote mostly one-page poems (my style) and her knack for insight into human nature was uncanny stuff. In short, the word choice wowed me and I said, "I have to read more of Ruth Stone -- sooner rather than later!"

And I will. And I hope you take the time to meet her, too, if she is as unfamiliar to you as she was to me....

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is a very old woman in 2002 when this book came out. She was born in Virginia in 1915, before the U.S. involvement in World War I. She won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2002 for this book or perhaps for her body of work. She'd already won many other major awards in the past. At some point during the production of this book Stone lost her sight and her daughter Abigail did the corrections and proofreading, reading aloud to her mother.

Stone's Wikipedia entry records a conversation she had with the journalist and novelist Elizabeth Gilbert in which Stone relates the experience of "catching a poem."

"As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming...cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, "run like hell" to the house as she would be chased by this poem.

The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would "continue on across the landscape looking for another poet".

And then there were these times, there were moments where she would almost miss it. She is running to the house and is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her. She grabs a pencil just as it's going through her and she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In those instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first."

If you would like to hear Gilbert relate this conversation, please listen to Gilbert's TED talk in which she talks about where creativity comes from.

This is one of Stone's poems from this book:

Seed

Corn is universal,
so like a Roman senator.
Its truths are silk tassels.
True its ears are sometimes
rotten, impure.
But it aspires in vast acres,
to conspire with every pollinator
and to bear for the future
in its yellow hair.

And what are your aspirations,
oh my dears,
who will wear into tatters
like the dry sheaves
left standing, stuttering
in November's wind;
my Indian corn, my maize,
my seeds for a ruined world.
Oh my daughters.

Ruth Stone published thirteen books of poetry. She died in 2011.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should have counted how many times Stone uses the word or image of a fractal. The fractals are fractaling (!): complexity, irregularity, recurrences (so many stark women in these pages--like the one intensely glimpsed on the train platform as the train pulls away or the one who "speaks no English" recalled in "Entering the Student's Poem"), iterations (so much travel: trains, buses), and somehow time can be thrown into this mix (moments throwing the poet back into other moments; not repeating, but morphing; unexpected triggers).

I was reading an interview with Ruth Stone and I can't help but read the following remark as a part of this fractal business: "I think that I have a certain kind of philosophical tendency in my brain that’s been there all along. You try to make some sort of patterns out of experience, but I don’t suppose they add up to any more than endless cells."

Another aspect of Stone's work that appealed to me was her mixing of the crude with the poetic. A good, blushworthy example: "At Eighty-three She Lives Alone." This octogenarian ain't shy.

Favorite poems: "Entering the Student's poem," "Spring Snow," "Three AM," "Train Ride."

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these will make your hands tremble.

[Joann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This year I am reading a book of poetry a month. Here is one reason I liked Ruth Stone's poetry. It is from her poem Metaphors of the Tree.
The tree wrapped around itself in multiple muscles;
a clump of trees come together under the bark,
twisting up; a corporate tree, the only tree in the yard.

[Dayna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of these poems had me by the throat. Many have unpredictable twists and turns. Many I had to read and reread and reread.

[Reed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating this the higher side of 3 stars.

Trains, nature, math, and memories are some of the topics covered this collection. I especially liked the repeated references to Mandelbrot, fractals, and the Klein bottle.

The poem "Assumptions" is a standout. "The inner is really the outer. And again, you are reminded of the Klein bottle." How many poems address the mathematical concept of a Klein Bottle, which is a next gen version of the Mobius Strip?

In "Messages", I like the optimism of "Cheer up, they say, the Universe is ours". Much preferable to the depressive attitudes of many poets in the Plath vein (or is it vain?).

Some of the other poems are of mixed impact for me, mainly to being less lucid.

[George P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rate a low four stars. Some very good poems and some not-so-good, as is to be expected.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more I read the poetry of Ruth Stone, the more I regret her passing in 2011. She weaves the natural world, current events, the lives of other characters, and science into the web of telling her own life. With unassuming eloquence, she speaks in a diction that is both commonplace and vivid:

"the power of nothing to multiply.
Turning the hand over to become the palm,
for a moment it can shape itself into a cup of water."

In this passage and throughout, Stone seeks a deep acceptance of what is and what has been so that she may live in the now, despite the terrible loss built into our very existence:

"Then the absent tree when the play yard is paved with asphalt,
a blank space where the tree was, a space that the birds pass pver,
where the wind does not pause."

Or in describing her decades as a widow:

"in my thirty years of knowing you
cell by cell in my widow's shawl,
we have lived together longer
in the discontinuous films of my sleep
that we did in our warm parasitical bodies"

In all, she finds "unreasoning hope" in the flights of starlings, in the "language of the meanings within the meanings" contained in the growth of cabbage in her garden, in her dreams and memories. This is an adult book of poetry for those readers who have lived long enough not to be impressed with bathos or the false art of faithless language twisted into pretense. Read it. Savor it.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the poems in this volume have to do with death and aging, a common theme among aging poets, but I'm just not old enough to really appreciate it yet. I may be in my 30s but I'm still more of a love and angst poem type girl.

I did like this one, Love.

Love

This part of myself devoted to you
admits of nothing that falls away.
Although I melt moment by moment
into something else, I carry you
with me, a doll of circumstance,
that dances as I do when I
present myself, the stranger,
to you, the stranger. We speak
of them hurriedly. We
take them out of our breasts
and hold them out to each other,
the glass hearts, the transparent bodies.

[Julie Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a childlike resonance to every poem and a profundity behind even the most whimsical of poems that can only come with experience and time. I wished there were more books of poetry by Ruth Stone, or more poets like her.

[Lorna]

I heard of Ruth Stone in Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, where she repeats a story Ruth told her.
The Tiger's Tail
Pg. 64
"One of the best descriptions I've ever heard of this phenomenon--that is, of ideas entering and exiting the human consciousness at whim--came from the wonderful American poet Ruth Stone.
I met Stone when she was nearly ninety years old, and she regaled me with stories about her extraordinary creative process. She told me that when she was a girl growing up on a farm in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields when she would sometimes hear a poem coming toward her---hear it rushing across the landscape at her, like a galloping horse. Whenever this happened, she knew exactly what she had to do next: She would "run like hell" toward the house, trying to stay ahead of the poem, hoping to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough to catch it. That way, when the poem reached her and passed through her, she would be able to grab it and take dictation, letting the words pour forth onto the page. Sometimes, however, she was too slow, and she couldn't get to the paper and pencil in time. At those instances, she could feel the poem rushing right through her body and out the other side. It would be in her for a moment, seeking a response, and then it would be gone before she could grasp it--galloping away across the earth, as she said, "searching for another poet."
But sometimes (and this is the wildest part) she would nearly miss the poem, but not quite. She would just barely catch it, she explained, "by the tail." Like grabbing a tiger. Then she would almost physically pull the poem back into her with one hand, even as she was taking dictation with the other. In these instances, the poem would appear on the page from the last word to the first--backward, but otherwise intact."

Well, with this delightful tale, I wanted to check her out. Gilbert also referenced In the Next Galaxy.
My local library had it, and I wanted to see if I liked to read poetry. I haven't felt compelled to read poetry for a long time.
And, still, I had to renew this book four times! I like her observation of the ordinary objects in our lives, and what feeling they evoke. And her observation about nature. I was startled by the poems about the man hanging himself. Like suicide, they were stark.
As I think is true of poetry, not all of the poems resonated. Here's one that did:


Seed
page 7

Corn is universal,
so like a Roman senator.
Its truths are silk tassels.
Ture its ears are sometimes
rotten, impure.
But it aspires in vast acres,
rectangular spaces,
to conspire with every pollinator
and to bear for the future
in its yellow hair.

And what are your aspirations,
oh my dears,
who will wear into tatters
like the dry sheaves
left standing, stuttering
in November's wind;
my Indian corn, my maize,
my seeds for a ruined world.
Oh my daughters.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book by a contemporary poet that is almost 20 years old can often feel more out of date than one that has managed to survive a century or two. Not this one! Ruth Stone still feels fresh and new.

Ruth Stone had an incredible ability to find the small moments that kept resonating, and was able to both bring the moment to life AND step beyond it in ways that under different hands might feel awkward or precious. For instance, here's the whole title poem, "In the Next Galaxy":

Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand-
new wraparound verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not
have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
but in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.

Wonderful how she can bring in her own failing sight and hearing without any whining at all!

A couple of readers might complain that much of Ruth Stone sounds the same. I think they are probably talking about the late work (which, sadly, is most of what people read). I find this all a strong simplicity that has been hard won and is completely engaging.

[David Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the longer view it doesn’t matter.
However, it’s that having lived, it matters.
So that every death breaks you apart.
You find yourself weeping at the door
of your own kitchen, overwhelmed
by loss. And you find yourself weeping
as you pass the homeless person
head in hands resigned on a cement
step, the wire basket on wheels right there.
Like stopped film, or a line of Vallejo,
or a sketch of the mechanics of a wing
by Leonardo. All pauses in space,
a violent compression of meaning
in an instant within the meaningless.
Even staring into the dim shapes
at the farthest edge; accepting that blur.

"Shapes" by Ruth Stone

In the Next Galaxy ** Read in Eastern Province, KSA and Juffair, Bahrain (Dec 2024)

[Sarah Paps · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this collection a very relaxing read, one that I enjoyed reading under a blanket by a fire on a cold winter's day. That's the kind of sentiment I got from it.

I feel like I should re-read it and when I do, I will be inclined to give it 4 stars. Stone's poems are not one pass reads, but they are also not complex. It's the subject matter she chooses and the way she chooses to display and explore those subjects that make a second read worthwhile. I especially enjoy all the references to math and science. Also, her word choices are not ordinary and make for a unique poetry read.

[margot · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.25) ruth stone writes with such beauty and conviction. her poetry remains always personal despite the emotional intensity of her subjects, and for that I think she's a very courageous writer and person. i found ruth stone through a poetry class i took a few semesters ago and from then on i have resonated with her story deeply. there is depth added because she's a local vermont writer and there's a sweetness for me in reading the fondness with which she describes vermont.
lovely little collection!

[Jessica Sathiyanathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I cannot decide whether or not I liked Ruth Stone's poetry in this collection. She makes deep connections with the human experience and paints a scene that makes you feel like you're there.
However, a lot of her themes revolve around aspects of the human experience that I find uncomfortable. It seems like she's pushing boundaries deliberately, but it just went a little far for my taste.
So while I connected with some of her poetry and enjoyed it, I also felt disconnected at the same time.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite from the volume:

Sorrow

Living alone the feet turn voluptuous,
cold as sea water, the thin brine
of the blood reaches them slowly;
their nubby heads rub one another.
How can you love them and yet
how live without them?
Their shoes lined up like caskets
in which they lie all day
dead from one another.
In the night
each foot has nothing to love
but the other foot.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not one for poetry, but I enjoyed Stone's musings within her poems. She has a great way of producing imagery, often of nature and science. She also is able to show her memories to the reader. This is really good, but poetry is just not for me.

[Nan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruth Stone's next galaxy is also the next room. You hear the universe move in her poems. And you also hear the old man next door rising from his bed, coughing.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful eccentric imagery wedged in with the everyday--love her mix of, on-the-porch with, what floats in on the pearly subconscious.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorites include “Seed,” “The Illusion,” “To Give This a Name, Astonishing,” “Reality,” “At Eighty-three She Lives Alone.”

[Katharine Holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Such imagery. Loved "Air", "The Other War", and "Don't Miss It".

[Mia Kalish · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love ruth

[Maya Hernández · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like books that are kind of gross and this satisfied that in a gorgeous way

[Grason Poling · Rating 5 out of 5]

w o w

[Naomi Ayala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a unique voice.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a genre filled with great 1 and 2 and 3 liners, Ruth Stone drops some real bangers.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth Stone has seen it all and these poems reflect a cynicism, but also a wonder. Somethings never do leave you your whole life and sometimes you can still appreciate small moments of delight.

[Margaret Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

ruth stone writes about fractals (every single poem is about fractals, iykyk