Where Water Begins: New Poems and Prose

By John Stone

Book Overview

A collection of the poetry of John Stone. The title is both a quest and mystery: water as source and water as life. The poems follow life's eddies and flows - along the streets of Oxford, through an Atlanta neighbourhood, to experience the loss of a spouse, but also the healing of time.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807123269
• ISBN13: 9780807123263
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 9.3"

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.