Ruth Stone was born in Virginia in 1915. She is the author of thirteen books of poetry and her collected poems, What Love Comes To, was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. She is the recipient of many honors, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which roofed her house.) In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. (As she has pointed out, her poems are "love poems, all written to a dead man" who forced her to "reside in limbo" with her daughters.) For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, UC Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at SUNY Binghampton. She passed away in 2011 at her home in Vermont.
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What Love Comes ToNew & Selected PoemsFrom"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 into the wind,
the blood thrashes in the thick veins.
The language of the feces, urine,
species, rut, offal, decay –
nothing is hidden from the dog,
who keeps its own counsel,
leading you by the leash.
What Love Comes To:New & Selected Poems -
What Love Comes ToNew & Selected PoemsFrom"Topography"
Do I dare to think that I alone am
The sum total of every night hand searching in the
Pounding pounding over the universe of veins, sweat,
Dust in the sheets with noses that got in the way?
Yes, I remember the turning and holding,
The heavy geography; but map me again, Columbus.
What Love Comes To:New & Selected Poems -
What Love Comes ToNew & Selected PoemsFrom"American Milk"
Then the butter we put on our white bread
was colored with butter yellow, a cancerous dye,
and all the fourth grades were taken by streetcar
to the Dunky Company to see milk processed; milk bottles
riding on narrow metal cogs through little doors that flapped.
The sour damp smell of milky-wet cement floors:
we looked through great glass windows at the milk.
Before we were herded back to the streetcar line,
we were each given a half pint of milk in tiny
milk bottles with straws to suck it up. In this way
we gradually learned about our country.
What Love Comes To:New & Selected Poems
“This volume rightly secures [Stone's] status as a sui generis treasure who has survived poverty, a lack of formal education, profound personal tragedy, and decades of obscurity to emerge as a pre-eminent American poet who is still writing vital poems at the age of ninety-three.” —Harvard Review [on What Love Comes To]
“At an age when many are merely repeating themselves, Ruth Stone has taken on new themes and images, created with both a seer’s eye and the eye of social witness. Of remembered love, loss, and poverty she writes with such a force of intelligence and compassionate dispassion that even the most humble, commonplace things inhabit a world made strange, lucid, luminous. In the Next Galaxy gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her eighties, fully inhabiting body and mind, writing poems that are vital and eloquent distillations of experience.” —2002 National Book Award Judges
"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 her to be simply inspired." —USA Today [on Simplicity]
Selected Works
