Where Water Begins: New Poems and Prose

By John Stone

Book Overview

Where Water Begins, which arrives thirteen years after his last collection of new poems, resumes John Stone's literary quest to express his fascination with life's mysteries and miracles. Much has happened in the interim, as this collection of writing intimates. While Stone's artistic gaze combines the perspectives of poet, physician, teacher, husband, and father, his world has changed, reorienting and deepening his vision. The title of the book suggests both a journey and an enigma: water as source, water as life--whether it flows as a rivulet near Stone's cabin in the north Georgia mountains or circulates within the human body. To quote W. H. Auden (as the book's title poem does):

Thousands have lived without love,
but none without water.

To read Where Water Begins is to follow life's eddies and flows--along the streets of Oxford, England, or through an Atlanta neighborhood ("Talking with the Mockingbird"); to experience not only "the bitter physics of the world" (the loss of a spouse in "Seeing in the Dark") but also the healing that comes with the tincture of time ("Abid-ing"); to rediscover the triumphs and solace of humor (the terror of piano lessons in "Preludes"); to turn the corner of a day and find joy in a soap bubble floating down through busy traffic; to recognize one's limitations ("He Attends Exercise Class--Once"); to encounter the incongruities of travel, like the third-floor Chicago hotel room with a sliding patio door but "my God--no patio outside " ("The Good-bye, Good Morning, Hello Poem"); to experience and reexperience a spectacular ice storm ("Ice"); and to welcome and bless the voice of an infant grandchild.

Stone's poem to his granddaughter, "Singing from the West Coast," concludes,

None of the banquets
of this world
would dare start

without you.

Where Water Begins is a book of many musics from a man attentive to the plenty, the mystery, and the passing of life's banquets.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807123277
• ISBN13: 9780807123270
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Introspection Although He Has Done Better

Because John Stone has had considerable success (and continued to add fans) with his previous books Renaming The Streets and In All This Rain (among others), many of us have become familiar with his style, so his very special insight and (as one reviewer said) his ability as a master choreographer of words were not new to me. I suspect anyone who reads this book as their first contact with Stone will add the joy of these discoveries.This one has "This Kind Of Thing Doesn't Happen Often...." another Stone classic....soapbubbles in traffic with his signature stab at your heart; his hand poem to Delese Wear (I don't think there is such a thing as a Stone anything without a hand reference - and Delese probably still sends him poems); American Gothic (I too love the Art Institute...eventually Stone will have written a poem to every painting in the building); but I too think this book will be remembered for the Oxford poems.....they are typical Stone....finely crafted, imagery you can taste/smell/feel, and with that patented twist at what makes you tick.If you want to know John Stone I would start with Renaming The Streets or In All This Rain, or even with the short stories of Country of Hearts...then, when you know the man add this one to your bookshelf. I keep my Stone books on the shelf in my office where I can see them in my daily work.....it makes me feel good to know he's in here with me.

fine poetry from a fine physician

this is exquisitely beautiful work, immediately accessible, immediately relevant to all of us. His finest collection of poetry.

This is a book to treasure and savor again and again.

John Stone's poems in WHERE WATER BEGINS spell out the complete alphabet of feeling. What we read is felt thought, felt language. These poems do not suffer from what T.S. Eliot once called "a dissociation of sensibility" --- thought and feeling presented separately. Thought without feeling is the very meaning of abstraction. Feeling without thought slides towards sentimentality. Dr. Stone is free of these schisms. It is difficult to find braver writing anywhere, particularly in the "Watershed" section fo this book where he writes about life after the death of his wife of more than thirty years. His memories of a stint at Oxford, which made home "so far from home" mean something, are written with the sense of unease of an American in another country. His elegy for John Ciardi is for a friend and patient as well as a poet. Postmodernists and the usual deconstructionalists and other "wordists" evaporate in the presence of poems like thse. The poems are human, as the Roman saying has it, and nothing human is alien to them. This is a book to treasure and savor again and again.