Introduction to a Poet- Ruth Stone
In hopes that you will discover someone new or perhaps revisit an old love.
Poetry touches our soul. The poet writes and is in communication with readers, a very human connection comes into being. We can read poetry in an intellectual manner - pulling it apart, noting all the literary devices, critiquing the poet’s effort - and that is one kind of experience. And then there is the wonder. The wonder of reading a poet who gives voice to what has been in your own heart. We read of an experience, a place, maybe a creature, described in such a true way that something in you rises up to it and leaves you grateful. The poetic experience.
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Ruth Stone
Stone was a poet who lived much of her life in Vermont and was the state poet for four years. Living a peripatetic existence, she taught in a number of colleges and finally found a bit of security with tenure at the age of 72 at State University of New York at Binghamton. But Vermont was where her heart was and where she died in 2011.
She has been described as having an unsentimental voice; she writes as she sees things, as they are. Stone experienced much sadness and difficulty in her own life and does not temper her poetry. Here is life as it presents itself to us.
Poet Sharon Olds said of Stone: “Stone is bold and rich in describing the plants and the things of the earth, and she does not over describe them so that they become literary artifacts rather than natural things… They [her poems] are mysterious, hilarious, powerful. They are understandable, often with a very clear surface, but not simple- their intelligence is crackling and complex.”
Train Ride
All things come to an end;
small calves in Arkansas,
the bend of the muddy river.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.
They go on forever, the swamp,
the vine-choked cypress, the oaks
rattling last year’s leaves,
the thump of the rails, the kite,
the still white stilted heron.
All things come to an end.
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever,
the wide dry field of geese,
a man stopped near his porch
to watch. Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.
If you are interested in reading more poetry by Ruth Stone, check out Essential Ruth Stone, What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems, and many more!