The Essential Ruth Stone

by Ruth Stone, Bianca Stone (Editor)

Expertly and sensitively selected by her granddaughter Bianca, The Essential Ruth Stone bears witness to a vivid fifty-year career of one of America’s most influential and pioneering poets. Distilling twelve books into a single volume―from the wild formalism of her early work to the science-filled cosmic intellect of her final collection― The Essential Ruth Stone shows a visionary poet with a physical grasp on language. Dazzling, humorous and grief-stricken poems explore the continuity of loss and love, in the spectral appearances of the dead husband, to portraits of an American childhood, life during wartime, and complex metaphysical inquiries into consciousness itself. Ruth Stone’s feminism, mysticism and overall fierceness shine through her wit and passion. Moving gracefully between the loneliness of grief and loss to the fullness of life and love, Stone approaches all her subjects with a profound humanity, an understanding born from her own lived experiences.

Genres: Poetry

179 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2020

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

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Wanting and dissatisfaction
Are the main ingredients
Of happiness.

I’ve come to really enjoy ‘Essential’ or ‘Selected’ collections spanning a poet’s entire career. They play out like a biopic, giving a narrative to the highlights of a lifespan to capture a beautiful portrait of the artist themselves. Single volumes are still my favorite, seeing a work of art in its singularity and power, but I do enjoy being introduced to a poet this way. Bulky collective volumes also provide this sort of effect, but they are long the way a big biography works whereas the Selected are sort of the movie version of that: quickly digestible and stylized for a purpose. The Essential Ruth Stone is a wonderful example of this, bringing the highlights from the span of her career that best depict the growth of her artistry. This volume also serves as a heartfelt tribute to the poet from her granddaughter, Bianca Stone, who is also a wonderful poet and edited this book. Ruth Stone is a treasure. Her work moves comfortably through humor and sadness, able to turn inward for introspective brilliance and also look outward at the natural world and our place within it. There is strength in the dualities of her work and ‘she grieves and laughs in the same gasp’ say Bianca in the really moving introduction. The Essential selections of Ruth Stone give us a touching look at the life and legacy of this wonderful poet, highlighting her style and themes in this carefully and lovingly curated collection.

‘The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.’
-from Green Apples

It’s hard to approach this book without considering the way it was created as a loving tribute to Ruth by her granddaughter. Which only aids in the enjoyment of the book. One of Bianca’s own volumes of poetry, the wonderful The Mobius Strip Club of Grief, takes its namesake from the title of one of Ruth’s poems.

The Möbius Strip of Grief

‘When I went into the room where you waited,
you said you were not staying here with me.
Angry, I went back to get an ice pick
where a large block of ice lay on the stairs.
It froze my fingers when I tried to lift it.
I am not a murderer, even in the brilliance
of sleep where poems are three-dimensional.
How often you come this way
in your cold contempt for my ignorance.’

I must confess that I find the image of sleep as somewhere that ‘poems are three-dimensional’ to be so utterly charming. As is the framing of this collection, which memorializes Ruth not only through her poems, but through printing scraps of her drafts and notes as well as several pages of photographs of the poet through her life. This collection was created with love and you can feel it and share in it’s warmth while diving into this book. Bianca has kept her grandmother’s memory eternal, and what better way to show your admiration and depth of relationship with a loved one than that. Bianca has also established a poetry foundation, part of which transformed Ruth’s home in Goshen, Vermont into a writers retreat. This all shows how powerful Ruth’s work was that she has and will continue to be read. ‘It is a testament to the greatness of a writer,’ Bianca concludes the introduction, that we can continue to examine, with curiosity and openness, indefinitely, the merits of her work.’

‘at my center / The bone glistens; of wondrous bones I am made.’

Ruth Stone wrote 13 volumes of poetry and received many honors in her life, winning the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Whiting Award and others. She also served as the Poet Laureate to Vermont from 2007 until her death in 2011. Born in 1915, Ruth was a single mother raising three girls after her second husband, Walter Stone, committed suicide in 1958. She once wrote that all her poems are ‘love poems, all written to a dead man’ and that his death forced her to ‘reside in limbo’ raising a family alone.

There is such a beauty to her work, oftentimes calm and collective and others jubilant and full of humor or protest at the human condition. This is a woman who had to accept what life gave her and chose to make something beautiful and lasting, like she addresses in the poem Accepting:

‘accepting
from each hand the gifts,
without knowing why they were
given or what to make of them.’

In the poem Fairy Tales, Ruth asks of the brave tin soldier of stories, While he passes, impractical child, / On his way to death in this strange dream; / Is he still seeing the beautiful, the good?’ This is a question that forms a succinct look into her oeuvre, Ruth is able to look darkness in the eye and still deliver a message that is beautiful and good. While she may sometimes open a critical look into the world, or use self-deprecating insights, you come away believing in goodness and strength. Particularly the strength of women. These are poems where ‘I took my heart out and held it in my hands,’ and the reader will feel her pulse beating strong upon each page.

The Porch

Whatsoever comes to the screen,
Firefly or moth,
I lean back in the wicker chair,
The porch my fragile skin
Between me
And the gorgeous open maw,
The sucking swallowing world.

Ruth Stone has a very tender touch and her work always seems like it is reaching out to pull you into a soothing embrace. These are poems that unlock themselves more and more with each read and while they sometimes appear slight upon first glance, there is a whole cosmos of understanding and insight to be gleaned each time you revisit her poetic landscapes. While not necessarily comparative to them, Stone’s poetry feels at home with readers who enjoy the works of Mary Oliver and Jane Hirshfield. This is a loving tribute to a beautiful poet and I would highly recommend spending some time in her words.

5/5

Good Advice

Here is not exactly here
because it passed by there
two seconds ago;
where it will not come back.
Although you adjust to this-
it's nothing, you say,
just the way it is.
How poor we are,
with all this running
through our fingers.
'Here,' says the Devil,
'Eat. It's Paradise.'

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review for the Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/arti...

ADVICE

My hazard wouldn’t be yours, not ever;
But every doom, like a hazelnut, comes down
To its own worm. So I am rocking here
Like any granny with her apron over her head
Saying, lordy me. It’s my trouble.
There’s nothing to be learned this way.
If I heard a girl crying help
I would go to save her;
But you hardly ever hear those words.
Dear children, you must try to say
Something when you are in need.
Don’t confuse hunger with greed;
And don’t wait until you are dead.


WAVERING

What makes you think you’re so different?
That was my weaker self hanging around outside the door.
The voices over the telephone were accusing, too.
“Must you always be you?” (They had the advantage,
More bold without faces. They swirled a few icecubes
With a suggestive pause.) For a moment
I took my heart out and held it in my hands.
Then I put it back. This is how it is in a competitive world.
But, I will not eat my own heart. I will not.


WANTING

Wanting and dissatisfaction
are the main ingredients
of happiness.
To want is to believe
there is something worth getting.
Whereas getting only shows
how worthless the thing is.
And this is why destruction
is so useful.
It gets rid of what was wanted
and so makes room
for more to be wanted.
How valueless is the orderly.
It cries out for disorder.
And life that thinks it fears death,
spends all of its time
courting death.
To violate beauty
is the essence of sexual desire.
To procreate is the essence of decay.

[Denver Public Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was unaware of Ruth Stone’s poetry until I read an interview quoting her: “I’m just as glad I’m obscure somewhat. That’s part of being a woman, too, at my age, at any rate... the obscurity gives you more freedom.” That truth hooked me, as did Stone’s faithful recording of Life’s stream of consciousness. This book is a family affair, edited by Stone’s granddaughter, and includes selections from all her books, like Ordinary Words (1999), In the Next Galaxy (2002) and In the Dark (2004).

[Quoth the Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently heard of Ruth Stone and I am so happy that I did. This book moved me in so many ways; laughing, sighing, and reflecting. The poems continued to grip me throughout this collection and continues to after I finished the book. Everything felt like it was loosening: the spinning world, intimate relationships, and humanity's barest emotions. While all the poems felt like the were slipping, there was always such beautiful, permanent texture that allowed me to come to each poem and relish in their unwinding natures.

"Telling me something;
saying something urgent.
I was happy."

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poet of my heart!

[Nick Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute treasure. Grateful for the excellent selection and editing work of Bianca Stone in putting together this collection. Highly recommend.

[Aurora · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems… what have they done to me?

[Rowan Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like that she likes bones

[Sophia Candler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Messed with 1959-1991 the hardest

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

CN: grief, suicide, descriptions of suicide, death of a spouse

I hadn't heard of Ruth Stone before I was gifted this book. I'm glad that I've heard of her now.

And that I was introduced to her via this collection. You can feel Stone age, and time move on around her as you read through the sections from her different collections.

She goes from talking of the wars as things she remembers to a poem about the internet. It gives more weight to the things she says about memory, history, the passage of time and grief. And makes her own judgement of her past choices more affecting.

I feel like this book has given me new ways to express the feeling I get when I walk past where an indoor market that I went to with my grandmother used to stand. Having a memory of a place that used to have a memory of my grandmother. This collection has a lot to say about that kind of experience.

[Mae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved getting to know this quintessential Vermont poet.
Edit: forgot to include my favorite poems!
Green Apples
The song of the Absinthe Granny
Pokeberries
Curtains
Winter
Names
I
L
LII
Simplicity
How They Got Her to Quiet Down
Then
Residue
Schmaltz
A Moment
Always Your Shadow
Poems
Sorrow and No Sorrow
My Mother's Phlox
The Wailing Wall
Speaking to My Dead Mother
The Dog
The Porch

[Karen Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been reading Ruth Stone for the last 20 years, and I really like how this collection gives an overview, reminding me what a good poet she is. Her poems reference personal experiences but also add a touch of mystery and sparkle to how daily life can be seen.

[natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

some really really great poems here. maybe i will write a longer review at another time. :)

[Chris]

Ruth Stone’s poetry is so grounding, so grounded in the beauty of the everyday. My favorites are “Plumbing” and “Goshen”.
Her poems exploring grief are as devastating as they assuage that pain.

[Jeffrey Schnitzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth Stone was my teacher. She was a wonderful teacher and person. She was also a truly fine poet - this book captures most of her best stuff. I recommend it highly.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Those endless closets and halls
in the brain where the unknown hides; that open for a
moment and then close again. That is where the
poems come from.
****
through narrow forests, I bid my
nights unwind,
I bid my days turn back, I broke my windows, I unsealed my locks.
***
but to feel with my eyes
the loss of you and me,
…
but in the glorious absence of grief
to see what was not meant to be seen,
the clusters, the aggregate, the undenying multiplicity.

I read somewhere that Stone was a cross between Lucille Ball and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and while I don’t apprehend that anywhere in her poems, there is a sense of the span of time the poet lived, and a record of what it was like to live in grief, in transience, in depression. I can’t quite relate, and nothing wowed me, but still an important poet. The resonance I did feel was the sense of ancestry, of my mother’s garden now overrun by invasives and weeds, the respect of the grieving, and the ways to be alive.

SNOW
Plentiful snow deepens the path to the woods.
Hay, hawing, shakes the juniper,
Gray squirrel and titmouse trick in hectic moods,
Fluff buffeters of down and fur.
Jay skates on ice-blue air with bluer flight,
Dives in down-soft whirl and comes up light.
The dried and dead hackberry dangles white,
Tall trees droop down while ground grows up,
And the powder-white snuff blows from the wind’s lip…

THE MAGNET

…I heard him coming through brambles, through narrow forests, I bid my
nights unwind,
I bid my days turn back, I broke my windows, I unsealed my locks.

SPECULATION

In the coolness here I care
Not for the down-pressed noises overhead,
I hear in my pearly bone the wear
Of marble under the rain; nothing is truly dead,
There is only the wearing away,
The changing of means. Nor eyes I have
To tell how in the summer the mourning dove
Rocks on the hemlock’s arm, nor ears to rend
The sad regretful mind
With the call of the horned lark.
I lie so still that the earth around me
Shakes with the weight of day;
I do not mind if the vase
Holds decomposed cut flowers, or if they send
One of their kind to tidy up. Such play
I have no memories of,
Nor of the fire-bush flowers, or the bark
Of the rough pine where the crows
With their great haw and flap
Circle in kinned excitement when a wind blows.
I am kin with none of these,
Nor even wed to the yellowing silk that splits;
My sensitive bones, which dreaded,
As all the living do, the dead,
Wait for some unappointed pattern. The wits
Of countless centuries dry in my skull and overhead
I do not heed the first rain out of winter,
Nor do I care what they have planted. At my center
The bone glistens; of wondrous bones I am made;
And alone shine in a phosphorous glow,
So, in this little plot where I am laid.

THE TALKING FISH

My love's eyes are red as the sargasso
With lights behind the iris like a cephalopod's.
The weeds move slowly, November's diatoms
Stain the soft stagnant belly of the sea.
Mountains, atolls, coral reefs,
Do you desire me? Am I among the jellyfish of your griefs?
I comb my sorrows singing; any doomed sailor can hear
The rising and falling bell and begin to wish
For home. There is no choice among the voices
Of love. Even a carp sings.

BEING HUMAN

Though all the force to hold the parts together
And service love reverse, turned negative,
Fountained in self destroying flames
And rained ash in volcanic weather;
We are still here where you left us
With our own kind: unstable strangers
Trembling in the sound waves of meaningless
Eloquence. They say we live.
They say, as they rise on the horizon
And come toward us dividing and dividing,
That we must save; that we must solve; transcend
Cohesive and repelling flesh, protoplasm, particles and survive.
I do not doubt that we will; I do not doubt all things are possible,
Even that wildest hope that we may meet beyond the grave.

GREEN APPLES
In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.

WILD ASTERS

I am here to worship the blue
asters along the brook;
not to carry pollen on my legs,
or rub strutted wings
in mindless sucking;
but to feel with my eyes
the loss of you and me,
not in the powdered mildew
that spreads from leaf to leaf,
but in the glorious absence of grief
to see what was not meant to be seen,
the clusters, the aggregate, the undenying multiplicity.

NAMES
My grandmother's name was Nora Swan.
Old Aden Swan was her father. But who was her mother?
I don't know my great-grandmother's name.
I don't know how many children she bore.
Like rings of a tree the years of woman's fertility.
Who were my great-aunt Swans?
For every year a child; diphtheria, dropsy, typhoid.
Who can bother naming all those women churning butter,
leaning on scrub boards, holding to iron bedposts
sweating in labor? My grandmother knew the names
of all the plants on the mountain. Those were the names
she spoke of to me. Sorrel, lamb's ear, spleenwort, heal-all;
never go hungry, she said, when you can gather a pot of greens.
She had a finely drawn head under a smooth cap of hair
pulled back to a bun. Her deep-set eyes were quick to notice
in love and anger. Who are the women who nurtured her for
me?
Who handed her in swaddling flannel to my great-grandmother's
breast?
Who are the women who brought my great-grandmother tea
and straightened her bed? As anemone in midsummer, the air
cannot find them and grandmother's been at rest for forty years.
In me are all the names I can remember -- pennyroyal, boneset,
bedstraw, toadflax -- from whom I did descend in perpetuity.

ALL TIME IS PAST TIME
Goliath is struck by the stone.
The stone turns into a bird.
The bird sings in her window.
Time is absurd. It flows backward.
It is married to the word.

This is the window of the giant's eyes.
This is the bird singing alone.
This is the river of forgetting.
This is the chosen stone.
This is goliath’s widow.

Struck by stone he leaps
Into the future. He lies
A monolith, a rune, light
From a distant nova. Not even a bone
Remembers begetting him ever.

The song is a monotone.
She is the word and the window.
She is the stone and the bird.
She is the bed of the river.

AND SO FORTH

Someone, or a group of someones,
Has gone to consider the strange altered behavior
Of penguins along the tip of south America.
It’s a film and reporting thing to do.
And someone like me thinks upon it.
Here in darkest Binghamton, I think of the plight of penguins
In the rapidly changing climate
Of the oceans and polar regions.
…as an Adelie penguin becomes my own penguin,
Inside my skull, even its oil-coated sleek body
That stands and waddles toward its own nest,
Somewhere among the million other nests,
And its own chick crying out
Among the million others, is distinctive.
Can I hope the great ear of the universe
Is pressed to the wall of space and hears me,
Its own chick peeping? Over here in this galaxy,
This little freight of penguins
And so forth?

WHAT IS A POEM?

Such slight changes in air pressure,
Tongue and palate,
And the difference 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.

MY MOTHER’S PHLOX

To send this to you toward the end of summer,
I was forced to rebuild my desktop.
Not in the old-fashioned way,
With saw and eye laid alongside the board
With some rue in my fingers,
But I wanted to create phlox.
Although, god knows, it can’t be done
In three dimensions, as the earth
Has so easily done it, but who can compete
With the earth? No, I wanted only the words
And they have lost themselves in the fields
Or along the gravel road. It’s just as well.
(Floks) n. pl. various plants of the genus Phlox,
Having opposite leaves and flowers,
With variously colored salverform corolla.
Over the years the phlox have spread
Even into the fields beyond the barn,
Into the edge of the woods, inventions
Of themselves in endless designs…
They exhale their faint perfume summer after summer,
And summer after summer it was my nightlong
Intoxicant. It was my potion, my ragged butterfly,
My faulty memory of my mother
Who was the same age then, as I am now.
As then, I was the same age you are now,
When my mother planted these phlox in my garden.
I’m sending them to you by UPS,
Wrapped in plastic in a proper box.
Take them out and stick them in water;
Dig a good bed and spread the roots.
They need almost no care.
They cast their seed; they thrive on neglect.
Later, they may change like the faces you love,
Ravaged and ravishing from year to year.

THE MESSAGE

I am aware and yet I am asleep.
What he is saying is clear as type,
Set by hand and bound for printing.
And yet it is upside down and backward.
I press it to my body and read it
Through my skin. It is the primer
Of our ancestors. It says nothing
Is sacred, nothing repeats.

ALL IN TIME

With something to do,
No wonder I sit at the typewriter.
Behind me, the clock has the
Monotonus voice of a parent.
Always it is something else I prefer.
The dirctionary is a moving finfr,
The compressed words of my life.
…
I walk down Longest Avenue holding my umbrella.
Information, merely information;
Everywhere bone sparkle,
Radials sifting deeper into ooze.
How I am coming apart.
How I scatter.
The air sparkles with my dust.
…
Sir William Herschel saw pinpoints
Of another kind of space
From which the milk of galaxies were poured,
As from a pitcher.
What is this universe that occupies my face?
I travel in an orderly erratic place.
I am a particle,
I am going toward something. I am complicated,
And yet, how simple is my verse.

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 wrap-around 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.

GENESIS
Cylinder sacks of water filling the oceans,
endless bullets of water,
skins full of water rolling and tumbling
as we came together.
As though light broke us apart.
As though light came with the rubble of words,
though we die among the husks of remembering.
It is as we knew it would be
in the echoes of endless terminals,
in the slow scaled guises of ourselves
when we came together in the envelopes of ourselves,
the bare shadow, the breath of words invisible;
as slight errors repeating themselves;
as degradation passes like madness through a crowd.
It was not ordained.
It was one drop of salt water against another.


THE DOG

The dog is God.
It knows it is God.
It is god living with god.
Even in the rain,
The esters, the pheromones,
Calligraphy of the sacred,
The great head points toward into the wind…

ONE YEAR I LIVED IN EARLYSVILLE, VIRGINIA

Those endless closets and halls
In the brain where the unknown hides; that open for a
Moment and then close again. That is where the
Poems come from.

[Gail Gauthier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I never knew Ruth Stone, I grew up near the town in Vermont where she was living with her daughters. I'd wanted to read some of her poetry for years and received this book this past Christmas. She has some lovely passages. Her work seems notable to me for two threads--everyday life and grief. I'm happy to be familiar with her work now.

[Beth Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful overview of the poems and poeming of Ruth Stone.

[Garrett Gomez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely excellent.

[Mia Kalish · Rating 5 out of 5]

finished in two days, i love ruth! her mind is scary

[James Neve · Rating 4 out of 5]

She's fascinating.
Loved it.
But she's a poet, so she's all over the place.
Made me laugh, darkly, a lot.
She's honest.