In the Next Galaxy

by Ruth Stone

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556592072
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	8.78(w) x 5.94(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Ruth Stone is the author of nine books of poetry, for which she has received the National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Shelley Memorial Award. She taught creative writing at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. She lives in Vermont.

Hometown:

Goshen, Vermont and Binghamton, New York

Date of Birth:

June 8, 1915

Place of Birth:

Roanoke, Virginia

Education:

University of Illinois (no degree); B.A., Radcliffe Institute of Independent Study at Harvard University

Read an Excerpt

Poems
When you come back to me
it will be crow time
and flycatcher time,
with rising spirals of gnats
between the apple trees.
Every weed will be quadrupled,
coarse, welcoming
and spine-tipped.
The crows, their black flapping
bodies, their long calling
toward the mountain;
relatives, like mine,
ambivalent, eye-hooded;
hooting and tearing.
And you will take me in
to your fractal meaningless
babble; the quick of my mouth,
the madness of my tongue.

Table of Contents

	The Professor Cries	3
	Spring Beauties	4
	Always Your Shadow	5
	Looking at Your Hand	6
	Seed	7
	In the Next Galaxy	8
	Metaphors of the Tree	9
	Rising	10
	Returning to the City of Your Childhood	11
	Leaving My Roommates in New York	12
	The Gambler	13
	Incarnation	14
	This Strangeness in My Life	15
	Genesis	16
	White on White	17
	Shapes	18
	Entering the Student's Poem	19
	Changes	20
	March 15, 1998	22
	Visions from My Office Window	23
	The Illusion	24
	Again--Now	25
	The Electric Fan and The Dead Man (or the widow as a useful object toward the end of the century)	26
	As It Is	28
	Useless Words	29
	The Eye within the Eye	30
	Always on the Train	31
	Bits of Information	32
	A Woodchuck Lesson	33
	Marbles	35
	Parts of Speech	37
	Before the Blight	38
	Poems	39
	What Meets the Eye	40
	Junction in the Midwest	41
	Breathing	43
	On the Slow Train Passing Through	44
	Eden, Then and Now	45
	Wanting	47
	Don't Miss It	48
	At the Ready	49
	That Other War	50
	Tip of the Iceberg	51
	Napping on the Greyhound	52
	Reading the Russians	53
	What We Have	55
	A Pair	57
	Spring Snow	58
	What We Don't Know	59
	Linear Illusions	60
	When I was Thirty-five You Took My Photograph	61
	Love	62
	To Give This a Name, Astonishing	63
	Reality	64
	At Eighty-three She Lives Alone	65
	A Good Question	66
	Getting to Know You	67
	From Boston to Binghamton	68
	Air	69
	Sorrow and No Sorrow	70
	Points of Vision	71
	Train Ride	72
	Assumptions	73
	The Poem	74
	The Interesting Way of Life	75
	The Provider	76
	Surviving	77
	Light	78
	Drought	79
	Sorrow	80
	Albany Bus Station	81
	Cousin Francis Speaks Out	82
	Messages	83
	Grade School	84
	Lines	86
	On the Mountain	87
	Tongues	88
	Half Sight in Middlebury	89
	Again I Find You	91
	The Cabbage	92
	Three AM	93
	To Try Again	94
	Not Expecting an Answer	95
	Mantra	96
	About the Author	99

Editorial Reviews

The much-lauded octogenarian Stone keeps up her appealing, sadder-but-wiser lyricism as she surveys subjects from McCormick reapers to radio astronomy, from fractals to "folded wings" and the fatigue of age, in this eighth collection, her first since the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ordinary Words (1999). Stone veers easily between compressed stories of her Virginia upbringing and her own life, on the one hand, and scenic Americana on the other, finding material in "New York mountain weather," roaming cats, "the railroad 's edge of metal trash." A third sort of Stone poem begins and ends in abstraction, finding spare lines for dejection or reflection, or asking, simply, "How can I live like this?" Stone's lifetime of craft permits her to pare down both description and meditation and, at her best, make startling use of short, slow lines and of occasional rhyme; standout lyric work like "Train Ride" or "At Eighty-Three She Lives Alone" recalls at once Stanley Kunitz and Kay Ryan, and should find a place in many anthologies. Stone's lesser poems can digress into mere jottings; she tends to top off her terse scenes and speculations with forceful (sometimes forced) closing statements, what she calls "severe abstract designs." Even those poems, however, reflect an observant and contemplative life, focused on simplicities of feeling, yet possessed of unfolding subtleties.

Publishers Weekly

Ruth Stone's work is alternately witty, bawdy, touching, and profound. But never pompous. Her honesty and originality give her writing a sense of youth and newness because she looks at the world so clearly, without all the detritus of social convention the rest of us pick up along the way... Her writing proves to be simply inspired.

USA Today

Ruth Stone began late, achieving her most powerful works with maturity and continuing their scope and span into age where most poets fall into silence or repetition.

Drunken Boat

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999 for Ordinary Words, Stone is now in her eighties, having published her first book of poetry when she was 44. Stone writes conversationally, with lyricism, honesty, wit, and plenty of focus on the passage of time. The suicide of her much-loved husband 40 years ago is a frequent theme, as are observations about aging (which she has achieved with great wisdom), the lives of her young students and neighbors, and ecological and political concerns. Stone notices and brings to her poems everyday items like marbles ("Held up to light,/ a small hole/ into another dimension"), an unplugged electric fan ("staring at the floor/ with the nonexpression of the working class/ temporarily laid off"), and cabbages ("blooms like Rubens nudes"). Her uses of subtle and occasional rhyme, off-rhyme, and inner rhyme are delicate and always appropriate. Highly recommended.-Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward

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