What Love Comes To
New & Selected Poems
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- £14.99
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- £14.99
Publisher Description
"A collection of poems that give rich drama to ordinary experience, deepening our sense of what it means to be human."—Pulitzer Prize finalist citation
"There is a broad, powerful streak of independence—even disobedience—that runs through Stone's writing and has inspired a great number of women after her."—Guardian
Finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, this retrospective of Ruth Stone's poetry combines the best work from twelve previous volumes with an abundance of new poems. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce political poems, and meditations on her husband's suicide and her own blindness. As Sharon Olds says in her foreword, "A Ruth Stone poem feels alive in the hands—ardent, independent, restless." What Love Comes To is a necessary collection from an American original.
Can it be that
memory is useless,
like a torn web
hanging in the wind?
Sometimes it billows
out, a full high gauze—
like a canopy.
But the air passes
through the rents
and it falls again and flaps
shapeless
like the ghost rag that it is—
hanging at the window
of an empty room.
Ruth Stone is the author of twelve books of poetry. Among her many awards are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award, a Whiting Award, and she was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. She taught creative writing at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. She lives in Vermont.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Many of Stone's loyal readers may know only her most recent, and most celebrated, works: the National Book Award winning In the Next Galaxy (2002), and its immediate prequels, which present a poet of wisdom and experience in clear, compact free verse. For this late-life writer, who will turn 93 this year and is the state poet of Vermont, "clotheslines/ where the laundry lashes the bitter air" present a "microcosm of the world." This wry and thoughtful poet, akin sometimes to Stanley Kunitz, sometimes to Grace Paley, appears again in the many new poems here, whose raw moments are a small price to pay for their power: "I am complicated," she writes, "and yet, how simple is my verse." But the real news is found in the selections from Stone's earlier books beginning in 1959, but especially with Topography (1971) and Cheap (1975), which may stun younger readers with their sheer variety. There are transcribed speeches from working-class lives, nursery rhyme couplets of uncanny force, angry political allegories and explorations of second-wave feminism in short, the evidence of an ambitious career, one that has been not only long, but full of constant change.
