In the Next Galaxy - Softcover

Stone, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556592078 ISBN 13: 9781556592072

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2004

Synopsis

“Her 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.”—Galway Kinnell on presenting the Wallace Stevens Award

“In the Next Galaxy gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her ’80s, fully inhabiting body and mind.”—National Book Award Judges’ statement

“Compassionate, comic, feminist and horrified by injustice, Stone’s poems are composed with an accessible deftness.”—The Oregonian

Ruth Stone has earned nearly every major literary award for her poetry. She taught at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. Today she lives in Vermont.

About this title

About the Author:

Ruth Stone is the author of nine 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 lives in Vermont.

From Publishers Weekly:

The much-lauded octogenarian Stone keeps up her appealing, sadder-but-wiser lyricism as she surveys subjects from McCormick reapers to radio astronomy, from fractals to "folded wings" and the fatigue of age, in this eighth collection, her first since the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ordinary Words (1999). Stone veers easily between compressed stories of her Virginia upbringing and her own life, on the one hand, and scenic Americana on the other, finding material in "New York mountain weather," roaming cats, "the railroad's edge of metal trash." A third sort of Stone poem begins and ends in abstraction, finding spare lines for dejection or reflection, or asking, simply, "How can I live like this?" Stone's lifetime of craft permits her to pare down both description and meditation, and, at her best, make startling use of short, slow lines and of occasional rhyme; standout lyric work like "Train Ride" or "At Eighty-Three She Lives Alone" recalls at once Stanley Kunitz and Kay Ryan, and should find a place in many anthologies. Stone's lesser poems can digress into mere jottings; she tends to top off her terse scenes and speculations with forceful (sometimes forced) closing statements, what she calls "severe abstract designs." Even those poems, however, reflect an observant and contemplative life, focused on simplicities of feeling, yet possessed of unfolding subtleties.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1556592078
• ISBN 13: 9781556592072
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120