Ordinary Words - Hardcover

Stone, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0963818392 ISBN 13: 9780963818393

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Ordinary Words is the luminous, wild, and lyrical collection of poetry that brought Ruth Stone the critical acclaim she long deserved with the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it paved the way to the National Book Award and long-deserved critical attention. Ordinary Words captures a unique vision of Americana, marked by Stone's characteristic wit, poignancy, and lyricism. The poet addresses the environment, poverty, and aging with fearless candor and surprising humor. Sister poet to Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Syzmborska, Ruth Stone offers a view of her country and its citizens that is tender humorous, and filled with hard political truths as well as love, beauty, cruelty, and sorrow. Ruth Stone is a poet of the people, and poet's poet. Ordinary Words shows that poetry is about everyday life, our life. Poems are set in Rutland, Vermont; Indianapolis; Chattanooga; Houston; Boise; and Troy, New York (where celluloid collars were made). Stone's subjects are trailer parks, state parks, prefab houses, school crossing guards, bears, snakes, hummingbirds, bottled water, Aunt Maud, Uncle Cal, lost love, dry humping at the Greyhound bus terminal, and McDonalds as a refuge from loneliness. Her heroes are dead husbands, wild grandmothers, struggling daughters: ordinary Americans leading simple and extraordinary lives.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Stone is the author of 13 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 lived in Vermont until her death in 2011.

Reviews

In the now abandoned race to find the next Virginia Hamilton Adair, one might have overlooked Stone, who, with 10 other books and numerous awards, has been here all along. Her 11th, with its unprepossessing title, is well worth discovering, consistent and forthright in its explorations of the quotidian and the dream-life it can produce. Writing of "this sly shadow of too much knowing," the poet takes us through "cities scattered like a deal of cards/...As I run on miraculous hooves/ from the wooden pen. As I run/ through the market street squealing.// This glaze of vision fragmented,/ confetti caught in the updraft;/ dark photograph of the penumbra." If poems like "1941" (about an interracial dalliance) don't quite find the tense language they seek, others are studded with socio-political zingers: "My middle-class beauty, testing itself,/ discovered the dull dregs of ordinary marriage." Stone often writes as aging observer, commenting wrly on a boring, line-up-at-the-counter existence; she laments the past's inability to break its frame-or her own inability to keep her late middle-aged daughters ("in over their hips") from falling into it. But Stone's other characters, with a contagious hope, look out with "worn eyes/ and see the bright new Pleiades." The ordinary, for Stone, turns out to be more than enough. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Founded recently to present "the work of women writers who have been neglected or misrepresented in the literary world," Paris Press did well by Stone--her book recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. At 85, with 11 books to her credit, Stone finally received long-overdue recognition. Stone's work could be described as witty (see, for instance, "Western Purdah" on the joys of wearing pantyhose) if it weren't so tartly obvious in addressing the darker side of life. Ordinary words, these aren't.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Then"

In our loss we accepted the strange shape of things
as though it had meaning for us,
as though we moved slowly over the acreage,
as though the ground modulated like water.
The floors and the cupboards slanted to the West,
the house sinking toward the evening side of the sky.
The children and I sitting together waiting,
there on the back porch, the massive engine
of the storm swelling up through the undergrowth,
pounding toward us.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0963818392
• ISBN 13: 9780963818393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96