Ruth Stone's Intricate Simplicities

Abstract

RUTH STONE'S Simplicity is the kind of book one might expect from a great poet just hitting her stride, eagerly testing the full range of her powers for the first time. Its 116 pages?unusually generous for a book of poems these days?embrace a dazzling array of genres, styles, forms, while the poems themselves touch every conceivable tone of feeling from grief to fury, ribaldry to tenderness. All this expansive energy may be misleading, however: Ruth Stone turned eighty last year. Only a very few poets have written at their peak this late in their careers. Yeats is the preeminent example in English; Hardy, Stevens, perhaps Williams could be named as well. Yet their late poetry, powerful as it is, reflects a contracting of sensiblity, a detachment from worldly con cerns, that might seem inevitable in old age. (An obituary quoted Stephen Spender saying, apropos of age, enjoy being slightly with drawn from everything, looking at things more from the outside.) What is most remarkable about the poems in Simplicity is their boister ous and passionate engagement with the world in all its tangles of nature and culture, fact and fiction, eros and violence. Before I discuss these extraordinary poems in detail, I must address the riddle of Stone's relative obscurity. Relative is an important quali fier, for Stone has in fact long enjoyed a devoted following that in cludes some of our best-known poets and critics. John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Leslie Fiedler, Sharon Olds, and Lucille Clifton are among those who have sung her praises, and this year a book of essays on her work was published entitled The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone. Yet she can hardly be called a poet's poet, if that term implies a writer best appreciated by insiders; Stone is one of the most accessible poets alive, and her poems provide a kind of imme diate pleasure, both on the page and in her incomparable readings, that one seldom finds in contemporary poetry. The short answer to the question of why she isn't better known may be that she's resolutely kept her distance from the various Po Biz circuits that manufacture