In the Next Galaxy

By Ruth Stone

Book Overview

Ruth Stone has rightly been called America's Akhmatova, and she is considered "Mother Poet" to many contemporary writers. In this, her eighth volume, she writes with crackling intelligence, interrogating history from the vantage point of an aging and impoverished woman. Wise, sardonic, crafty, and misleadingly simple, Stone loves heavy themes but loathes heavy poems.

Shapes

In the longer view it doesn't matter.
However, it's that having lived, it matters.
So that every death breaks you apart.
You find yourself weeping at the door
of your own kitchen, overwhelmed
by loss. And you find yourself weeping
as you pass the homeless person
head in hands resigned on a cement
step, the wire basket on wheels right there.
Like stopped film, or a line of Vallejo,
or a sketch of the mechanics of a wing
by Leonardo. All pauses in space,
a violent compression of meaning
in an instant within the meaningless.
Even staring into the dim shapes
at the farthest edge; accepting that blur.

"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 her to be simply inspired."--USA Today

Ruth Stone was born in Virginia in 1915. She is author of eight books of poems and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. She lives in Vermont.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556591780
• ISBN13: 9781556591785
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 110 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

In the Next Galaxy: A Micro and Macro Poetic Vision

After reading Ruth Stone's "In the Next Galaxy" I was reminded of the cinematography of the Eames brothers - specifically their film, "Powers of Ten," where the camera manages to convey in a minimum of frames just how far out into space or how far down into atomic structure the images change by following multiples of ten. Indeed, here is Ruth Stone looking upward and transforming some wind-whipped trash and a squadron of crows into "...the gaity of flying paper/and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds." Hers is a vital creative vision that makes magic within the imagery of a poem and an alchemy takes place. As the Eames lens went from outer space into the orbits of electrons, Ruth Stone follows wooden piles that are "...driven deep into the sand (and) are at last exposed,/ Their thin bones fragile as tiny star fish." Here is poetry that lures us out to swim through the senses, but never allows us to drown in the mere voluptuousness of the universe. There is inevitably a cool intellectual awareness that suddenly pulls us out on to the shore of consciousness where we, the readers, all lie chilled on the sand talking to ourselves in simple banalities, saying "Oh, my God. That's beautiful. How did she EVER think to compare those....?" But, then you realize the sun is down, you're alone on the beach, and it's time to go in.Burgess Needle, Retired Tucson Librarian and Former co-director of The Southern Arizona Writing Project

What Szymborska is to Polish..

...Ruth Stone is to English. In The Next Galary is yet another compendium of crackling wit, interrogating history from the vantage point of an aging (and impoverished?) woman -- Ruth is 86. Fluffy love poetry is not high on Stone's agenda, this is razor sharp and yet misleadingly simple, almost conversational, compilation of heavy themes wrapped in very light poems. If you have a thing for poetry and haven't yet read Ruth Stone, this is as good a place to start as any. If you have read her already, this review is meaningless, you already know you ought to get this anthology too.

Winner of at least two national awards

From Inside BU: A few weeks after winning the National Book Award, poet Ruth Stone, Bartle emerita professor of English, has won the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Prize. Given annually, the $150,000 award, which was announced December 23, recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Stone, 87, said she was "stunned, humbled and made jubilant" by the recognition. In explaining why the committee chose Stone, former Vermont Poet Laureate Galway Kinnell, one of the prize's five judges, wrote: "Ruth Stone's 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. Her poems are experiences, not the record of experiences. They are events, interactions between the poet and the world. They happen - there on the page before us and within us - surprising and inevitable."