What do you think?
Rate this book
The Adamant
A reissuing of The Adamant, poems by Mary Ruefle.
72 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1989
3 people are currently reading
78 people want to read
About the author
Mary Ruefle
47 books436 followersMary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist. The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature.
Ruefle's work has been widely published in literary journals. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ruefle currently lives in New England. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and is visiting faculty with the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/50-...
Ruefle's work has been widely published in literary journals. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ruefle currently lives in New England. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and is visiting faculty with the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/50-...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 12, 2020
II
A hoop of no value, an even smaller ball- something he might lose, nothing with a string. I beg to be stolen!
III
Whenever the boys spoke to me, I hid my fingers in my muff and there I would make small imitations of Christ. These little acts of love formed a flower bud out of my face. Although I was barely fourteen, I felt it best to leave the world at once.
vi
Believe me, don't wait until tomorrow to begin becoming a saint. I oblige you to take your wooden tops and go play for at least an hour in the attic. I must stay here in my bed. I'm waiting for the Thief, you know.
Vlll
I'm suffering very much, it's true, but am I suffering well, that's the point. Take silence for example-what failures in clarity it prevents. I speak especially about silence because it's on this point that I fail the most.
X
No line has ever given me more pleasure to write than this one in which I have the good fortune to tell you he is very nearly through unpetaling me!
xii
Scarcely had I laid my head on the pillow when I felt a bubbling stream on my lips. My blood was like a plaything. When God abandoned it, he fell asleep and dreamt he was still playing with it.
Council of Agde
In the village of Agde, in 835, an ecclesiastical court, after
much debate, ruled for the first time that women had souls.
Armed with a cottonpuff and a little sword
the bachelorette is attacking her toes:
Lesbos blue, black grape, pink stupor.
The variegated half face of a modern master
leers on the wall.
Everything she owns has its own white space
and is centered so: spare hangers
in the spare closet, shoes
in their own neat row.
The phone has its own room
and is held like a gun,
snug to the temple. Meals?
She'll touch nothing but noodles,
finely sauced in a cardboard box.
And babies? At the end of an alley
an old woman sits with her needles
knitting them out of dead skin.
The Ferns
One day we will no longer be stunned
by the bric-a-brac,
the china model of each month
with her name on a sash,
February molded with a miniature muff
or June with a tuft of net
glued to her tiny shoe.
The violet dachshund made of clear glass,
chipped yellow plate,
pink chalk of the pots-de-creme
in the salt-eaten blue of the snappy air
where we found our troves,
these conversation pieces
with nothing to say.
What were we doing out there in the world
but looking for something to bring back
and set by the bed
as proof we had been?
Do nuns collect?
And the favored whore
in her high shoes,
insteps arched like a back in labor,
needs a few things to survive.
We put on and put off
our coats.
We know the earth
once belonged to the ferns.
But these earrings
in the shape of grapes,
complete with frosted leaves,
they dangle and glisten;
we bear their weight
for awhile.
*
A hoop of no value, an even smaller ball- something he might lose, nothing with a string. I beg to be stolen!
III
Whenever the boys spoke to me, I hid my fingers in my muff and there I would make small imitations of Christ. These little acts of love formed a flower bud out of my face. Although I was barely fourteen, I felt it best to leave the world at once.
vi
Believe me, don't wait until tomorrow to begin becoming a saint. I oblige you to take your wooden tops and go play for at least an hour in the attic. I must stay here in my bed. I'm waiting for the Thief, you know.
Vlll
I'm suffering very much, it's true, but am I suffering well, that's the point. Take silence for example-what failures in clarity it prevents. I speak especially about silence because it's on this point that I fail the most.
X
No line has ever given me more pleasure to write than this one in which I have the good fortune to tell you he is very nearly through unpetaling me!
xii
Scarcely had I laid my head on the pillow when I felt a bubbling stream on my lips. My blood was like a plaything. When God abandoned it, he fell asleep and dreamt he was still playing with it.
Council of Agde
In the village of Agde, in 835, an ecclesiastical court, after
much debate, ruled for the first time that women had souls.
Armed with a cottonpuff and a little sword
the bachelorette is attacking her toes:
Lesbos blue, black grape, pink stupor.
The variegated half face of a modern master
leers on the wall.
Everything she owns has its own white space
and is centered so: spare hangers
in the spare closet, shoes
in their own neat row.
The phone has its own room
and is held like a gun,
snug to the temple. Meals?
She'll touch nothing but noodles,
finely sauced in a cardboard box.
And babies? At the end of an alley
an old woman sits with her needles
knitting them out of dead skin.
The Ferns
One day we will no longer be stunned
by the bric-a-brac,
the china model of each month
with her name on a sash,
February molded with a miniature muff
or June with a tuft of net
glued to her tiny shoe.
The violet dachshund made of clear glass,
chipped yellow plate,
pink chalk of the pots-de-creme
in the salt-eaten blue of the snappy air
where we found our troves,
these conversation pieces
with nothing to say.
What were we doing out there in the world
but looking for something to bring back
and set by the bed
as proof we had been?
Do nuns collect?
And the favored whore
in her high shoes,
insteps arched like a back in labor,
needs a few things to survive.
We put on and put off
our coats.
We know the earth
once belonged to the ferns.
But these earrings
in the shape of grapes,
complete with frosted leaves,
they dangle and glisten;
we bear their weight
for awhile.
*
May 19, 2018
Lines that I adored...
The beautiful vagueness...(Green Pears)
Something unpronounceable
followed by a long silence
points out my life
is becoming a landscape. (Winter Sleep)
What were we doing out there in the world
but looking for something to bring back
and set by the bed
as proof we had been? (The Ferns)
And the man in the chair
whoever he is in his sleep
lets out the sounds of stones
rolling in the surf. (An American Dream)
Favorite poem: The Picnic
In an interview for the Paris review with Caitlyn Youngquist (Dec 12, 2016), May Ruelfe spoke probably one of my favorite lines ever :
"Poems are my inner life, take it or leave it. I don't particularly care what the reader thinks because I'm just not invested in other peoples responses to my inner life."
Other lines in that interview I loved, not that she cares if I love them or not, which delights me to no end:
"My memories are so strong, but what amazes me is that I forgot about this one, I never wrote about it until now, and I don't remember how it came back to me. It's a source of never ending wonder, how that moment in Congo Museum when I was sixteen resurfaced at sixty-four, when I was writing. It took that long for the experience to incubate,. I love that about writing, how past experiences can incubate for decades and then suddenly appear. It can be a memory, an image, an experience, an idea--they come back! This experience was so powerful that I should've known, I was too young to know, but I should've known it was going to come back. Anything that powerful will incubate and come back."
...a woman's power was always posited on physical attractiveness, the ability to have children. So as a man ages, he gains power, and as a woman ages, she loses it, or feels as though she does. If you go back to this paradox, which I understand people may find antiquated, you find that there are still shards and shreds of it everywhere."
The beautiful vagueness...(Green Pears)
Something unpronounceable
followed by a long silence
points out my life
is becoming a landscape. (Winter Sleep)
What were we doing out there in the world
but looking for something to bring back
and set by the bed
as proof we had been? (The Ferns)
And the man in the chair
whoever he is in his sleep
lets out the sounds of stones
rolling in the surf. (An American Dream)
Favorite poem: The Picnic
In an interview for the Paris review with Caitlyn Youngquist (Dec 12, 2016), May Ruelfe spoke probably one of my favorite lines ever :
"Poems are my inner life, take it or leave it. I don't particularly care what the reader thinks because I'm just not invested in other peoples responses to my inner life."
Other lines in that interview I loved, not that she cares if I love them or not, which delights me to no end:
"My memories are so strong, but what amazes me is that I forgot about this one, I never wrote about it until now, and I don't remember how it came back to me. It's a source of never ending wonder, how that moment in Congo Museum when I was sixteen resurfaced at sixty-four, when I was writing. It took that long for the experience to incubate,. I love that about writing, how past experiences can incubate for decades and then suddenly appear. It can be a memory, an image, an experience, an idea--they come back! This experience was so powerful that I should've known, I was too young to know, but I should've known it was going to come back. Anything that powerful will incubate and come back."
...a woman's power was always posited on physical attractiveness, the ability to have children. So as a man ages, he gains power, and as a woman ages, she loses it, or feels as though she does. If you go back to this paradox, which I understand people may find antiquated, you find that there are still shards and shreds of it everywhere."
July 12, 2024
An interesting blend of some sort of religious-confessional poetry (?) with emotions expressed surrealistically. Not sure I thoroughly enjoy it, although there verses I really liked. And it seemed she incorporated humor in her poetry, not the ones that make you burst out laughing, but the way she crafted these lines, for instance:
"when he holds you:
fear of losing you in his Siamese
dumpling-assed twin."
Dumpling-assed twin- so randomly put, yet so intriguing.
"when he holds you:
fear of losing you in his Siamese
dumpling-assed twin."
Dumpling-assed twin- so randomly put, yet so intriguing.
Read
August 12, 2020part 1 is lots of nature
mix of decay and pretty pastoral things
sometimes the mix is unexpected
I like reaching part 2 after part 1
less regularity from poem to poem but then the regularity of part 1 is like an echo or the thing against which poems in part 2 bounce. and has more of the gross things that have to do with life, like scabs. scabs on the man's head are so gross. but the scabs are not decaying. I like the comparison of scab to dead animal body. but then dead animals appear again. and lots of God. moving fluidly from century to century. has the feeling of a stone church somewhere in the country and makes me think of Agatha Christie murder mysteries for some reason.
didn't read part 3
except for the "miserable, ankle-pegged bleating"
this is the feeling... rain, slight depression. in boredom thinking about God and trying to think up something beautiful. remembering all the beautiful things written about the countryside and thinking, well, this country is like the ugly twin of those written versions, the same, but different, there is this miserable bleating and that is the background music, and the ugly twin is the more beautiful because it is ugly. so this is what we write and feel a slight boredom or lack of energy and decide that this lack of energy is a part of the ugliness of the ugly twin and so a lovely thing?
linked in my mind to Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
+Lolly Willowes and what else?
mix of decay and pretty pastoral things
sometimes the mix is unexpected
I like reaching part 2 after part 1
less regularity from poem to poem but then the regularity of part 1 is like an echo or the thing against which poems in part 2 bounce. and has more of the gross things that have to do with life, like scabs. scabs on the man's head are so gross. but the scabs are not decaying. I like the comparison of scab to dead animal body. but then dead animals appear again. and lots of God. moving fluidly from century to century. has the feeling of a stone church somewhere in the country and makes me think of Agatha Christie murder mysteries for some reason.
didn't read part 3
except for the "miserable, ankle-pegged bleating"
this is the feeling... rain, slight depression. in boredom thinking about God and trying to think up something beautiful. remembering all the beautiful things written about the countryside and thinking, well, this country is like the ugly twin of those written versions, the same, but different, there is this miserable bleating and that is the background music, and the ugly twin is the more beautiful because it is ugly. so this is what we write and feel a slight boredom or lack of energy and decide that this lack of energy is a part of the ugliness of the ugly twin and so a lovely thing?
linked in my mind to Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
+Lolly Willowes and what else?
February 1, 2024
The Law of Least Action
The difference between summer and winter
will do for distraction in a life.
You must believe it.
Recall my white hands
in the bush
while the ants watched, their eyes
segmented like blackberries.
One drowned in a bowl,
half milk, half cream,
and I ate him.
Now I no longer love to be idle.
Sooner or later, all of our heads
will be tested.
First snow, then vodka.
One by one
cut off or crowned.
The difference between summer and winter
will do for distraction in a life.
You must believe it.
Recall my white hands
in the bush
while the ants watched, their eyes
segmented like blackberries.
One drowned in a bowl,
half milk, half cream,
and I ate him.
Now I no longer love to be idle.
Sooner or later, all of our heads
will be tested.
First snow, then vodka.
One by one
cut off or crowned.
August 18, 2020
Language-driven poetry in the vein of Jane Hirshfield. Universal themes (nature, love, loss) with ambiguous subjects/personas, thereby transcending merely self-conscious work. Spiritual, accessible, solid. Worth reading and rereading.
December 30, 2023
Mujer iluminada.
December 7, 2025
3.5 ish. Not totally my thing but many wonderful moments.
February 6, 2013
The first section seems to lack the fluidity and abstract implementation which is brilliantly juxtaposed and used in her later work. There are numerous examples but here is one:
"Mountain tips soften after so much rain,
the wild guesses of birds blending with air
and the uppermost buds, with a godlike
promotion, burst open."
There is a supreme detachment in the imagery in that Ruefle isn't showing action but referring to it in a past tense interchangeably with present. Words are sometimes used for impact as an adjective rather than their place within the larger context of the piece such as "godlike" in this case. It also has no specific instantiation really, the rain has softened the mountain tips is the first image and the second is birds blending with the air, a wholeness and connectivity that is presented as a 'wild guess'. The bursting of buds and natural imagery are very forceful to a specific dichotomy of us and nature. Furthermore images are merely supplanted together at times, which read like a cut up such as:
"The cow's teats have frozen, two
candles dipped on the same string."
There is an attempt at finding extreme depth and over arching pantheism in the simplicity of objects and sounds but sometimes it feels very hokey and quaint.
"Then the pears on the ground
split apart,
showing the semifruitful
that lives inside of the living
like an extraneous truth."
This inter-connectivity theme works much better in her later work, but here it doesn't even make sense and nor does it illicit feeling which isn't playing on the assumed holistic tendencies of the reader, who for the most part finds it moving with the injection of the right enjambment and words. Mention God and give agency to something without it and suggest that truth is within the minutia then set the action within the proverbial bucolic Eden paradise.
'You cringe, spot the sun stealing
oranges from the pockets of mountains."
Anthropomorphism on the sun, that is stealing oranges in the mountain may be a good example of what I mean. Other problems are the speed to which images move and the unfocused nature of the images in question, and occasionally its just messy in its attempted depth of abstraction:
"Something unpronounceable
followed by a long silence
points out my life
is becoming a landscape."
In the first section only the opening and ending poem really are striking in their poignancy and depth of writing that Ruefle will show all the time in her later work for example, the opening stanza of the first poem:
"Already quite leafless, the butternuts
are growing less and less sane,
as though the waste of being something
were so great, they shuddered
and threw off the future."
The second half has flashes of brilliant realism, odd imagery and good observations mixing both. However read this poem, it's fanciful gibberish, attempting depth and emotion:
"When I'm one white jawbone
with an army of molars
how strange it will be
for Uranians
or Plutonians to arrive
and find my ashtray
with the crashed white stubs,
some with red rings,
and never know the language:
never guess mouths
drifting from kiss to kiss
made words
driving the spaceships in."
The last poem of the section again evokes the equation of looking at simplicity from a sort of poetic pantheism, she loves god without him realizing it. Despite this some images are beautifully done:
"And the man in the chair,
whoever he is in his sleep,
lets out the sound of stones
rolling in surf."
Why is the piece sectioned up into three parts though, the decisions to do this seems arbitrary and not providing breaks or distances within the poem but merely continuing the same narrative that was already established in i and ii?
Furthermore the poetic project is not legitimated by mere mention of X and then moving on such as:
"One does not have to listen
before hearing them,
the goats at sea
who are fastened on a crag
and left to rot."
Rotting goats at sea that one doesn't have to listen to before hearing. Why include this minute particular image of the goat other than its strange inclusion within the idea you are presenting? It's simple dadaism and its not effective. Part of the problem is the bashing together of opposites by using objects. Yeats used "The murderous innocence of the sea" by juxtaposing two ideas of what constitutes murder and innocence and then applying it to an object or thing. This is effective. In this book, Ruefle pastes together objects and things, then tries to equate it to a singular idea, which feels only silly and disparate in its effectiveness and suddenly you have a poem using a goat and the idea of rotting on a sea to convey a semblance of loss, detachment and death?
"Mountain tips soften after so much rain,
the wild guesses of birds blending with air
and the uppermost buds, with a godlike
promotion, burst open."
There is a supreme detachment in the imagery in that Ruefle isn't showing action but referring to it in a past tense interchangeably with present. Words are sometimes used for impact as an adjective rather than their place within the larger context of the piece such as "godlike" in this case. It also has no specific instantiation really, the rain has softened the mountain tips is the first image and the second is birds blending with the air, a wholeness and connectivity that is presented as a 'wild guess'. The bursting of buds and natural imagery are very forceful to a specific dichotomy of us and nature. Furthermore images are merely supplanted together at times, which read like a cut up such as:
"The cow's teats have frozen, two
candles dipped on the same string."
There is an attempt at finding extreme depth and over arching pantheism in the simplicity of objects and sounds but sometimes it feels very hokey and quaint.
"Then the pears on the ground
split apart,
showing the semifruitful
that lives inside of the living
like an extraneous truth."
This inter-connectivity theme works much better in her later work, but here it doesn't even make sense and nor does it illicit feeling which isn't playing on the assumed holistic tendencies of the reader, who for the most part finds it moving with the injection of the right enjambment and words. Mention God and give agency to something without it and suggest that truth is within the minutia then set the action within the proverbial bucolic Eden paradise.
'You cringe, spot the sun stealing
oranges from the pockets of mountains."
Anthropomorphism on the sun, that is stealing oranges in the mountain may be a good example of what I mean. Other problems are the speed to which images move and the unfocused nature of the images in question, and occasionally its just messy in its attempted depth of abstraction:
"Something unpronounceable
followed by a long silence
points out my life
is becoming a landscape."
In the first section only the opening and ending poem really are striking in their poignancy and depth of writing that Ruefle will show all the time in her later work for example, the opening stanza of the first poem:
"Already quite leafless, the butternuts
are growing less and less sane,
as though the waste of being something
were so great, they shuddered
and threw off the future."
The second half has flashes of brilliant realism, odd imagery and good observations mixing both. However read this poem, it's fanciful gibberish, attempting depth and emotion:
"When I'm one white jawbone
with an army of molars
how strange it will be
for Uranians
or Plutonians to arrive
and find my ashtray
with the crashed white stubs,
some with red rings,
and never know the language:
never guess mouths
drifting from kiss to kiss
made words
driving the spaceships in."
The last poem of the section again evokes the equation of looking at simplicity from a sort of poetic pantheism, she loves god without him realizing it. Despite this some images are beautifully done:
"And the man in the chair,
whoever he is in his sleep,
lets out the sound of stones
rolling in surf."
Why is the piece sectioned up into three parts though, the decisions to do this seems arbitrary and not providing breaks or distances within the poem but merely continuing the same narrative that was already established in i and ii?
Furthermore the poetic project is not legitimated by mere mention of X and then moving on such as:
"One does not have to listen
before hearing them,
the goats at sea
who are fastened on a crag
and left to rot."
Rotting goats at sea that one doesn't have to listen to before hearing. Why include this minute particular image of the goat other than its strange inclusion within the idea you are presenting? It's simple dadaism and its not effective. Part of the problem is the bashing together of opposites by using objects. Yeats used "The murderous innocence of the sea" by juxtaposing two ideas of what constitutes murder and innocence and then applying it to an object or thing. This is effective. In this book, Ruefle pastes together objects and things, then tries to equate it to a singular idea, which feels only silly and disparate in its effectiveness and suddenly you have a poem using a goat and the idea of rotting on a sea to convey a semblance of loss, detachment and death?
June 25, 2024
"Days, nights, confined like a leak hitting
the same dull pail, keep falling
from heights that have grown."
the same dull pail, keep falling
from heights that have grown."
March 9, 2014
I have been stung by a bee a number of times during my childhood, but it has been so long I do not remember the sensation. I wonder how painful it is, and whether now, as an adult, I would be able to tolerate the pain when as a child I could not.
I have a vivid memory of a beehive at our cottage. The family had packed up the car, and we all sat inside and watched as my father knocked down the beehive and ran back to us as fast as he could. I don't believe he was stung, but I know that hive was responsible for the stings my brother had received.
I don't remember seeing My Girl, but I always felt that the death was too strange for a children's film.
Now at our cottage we have fake hives. They sway in the wind.
I have a vivid memory of a beehive at our cottage. The family had packed up the car, and we all sat inside and watched as my father knocked down the beehive and ran back to us as fast as he could. I don't believe he was stung, but I know that hive was responsible for the stings my brother had received.
I don't remember seeing My Girl, but I always felt that the death was too strange for a children's film.
Now at our cottage we have fake hives. They sway in the wind.
March 31, 2009
This early book in Mary Ruefle's poetic career makes it clear that her main preoccupation is to make it new while following her bliss: that is, her early work is utterly different from her middle and later books. Wherever she goes next is departure from what's she's already done, and an arrival into something new. She is always discovering something fresh in her work.
Whichever book of hers I pick up, whether it's the work of a poet just setting out, or any one of those ten volumes she has written along the way, the combination of range and breadth, along with depth, is phenomenal. It's a rare poet who plumbs this deep, while writing across so broad a spectrum.
Whichever book of hers I pick up, whether it's the work of a poet just setting out, or any one of those ten volumes she has written along the way, the combination of range and breadth, along with depth, is phenomenal. It's a rare poet who plumbs this deep, while writing across so broad a spectrum.
February 1, 2025
Millbrook
after Montale
What becomes of the leaf
that followed you (now that
you're dead) whenever you
walked in toe woods?
The deer still stare and
the roses pop up; your
umbrella gets opened
and shut.
I take off my glasses at night.
If I talk to the dark
I'm afraid to say
it no longer belongs to you.
i know a poetry book is good when i cannot shake off the image of my child self crouched observing the moss and the summer mountains so blue and the warm wind and when i cannot stop reading even though i am at my desk, supposedly working and when i dream so vividly im finally alive.
May 26, 2015
Beautifully written--though I will admit that I couldn't pierce through the surface to reach some of the deeper levels on many poems. I've been busy lately, so I'll claim the full blame rather than laying any at the poet's doorstep.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews