In the Next Galaxy

After reading Ruth Stone's "In the Next Galaxy" I was reminded of the cinematography of the Eames brothers - specifically their film, "Powers of Ten," where the camera manages to convey in a minimum of frames just how far out into space or how far down into atomic structure the images change by following multiples of ten. Indeed, here is Ruth Stone looking upward and transforming some wind-whipped trash and a squadron of crows into "...the gaity of flying paper/and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds." Hers is a vital creative vision that makes magic within the imagery of a poem and an alchemy takes place. As the Eames lens went from outer space into the orbits of electrons, Ruth Stone follows wooden piles that are "...driven deep into the sand (and) are at last exposed,/ Their thin bones fragile as tiny star fish." Here is poetry that lures us out to swim through the senses, but never allows us to drown in the mere voluptuousness of the universe. There is inevitably a cool intellectual awareness that suddenly pulls us out on to the shore of consciousness where we, the readers, all lie chilled on the sand talking to ourselves in simple banalities, saying "Oh, my God. That's beautiful. How did she EVER think to compare those....?" But, then you realize the sun is down, you're alone on the beach, and it's time to go in.Burgess Needle, Retired Tucson Librarian and Former co-director of The Southern Arizona Writing Project

...Ruth Stone is to English. In The Next Galary is yet another compendium of crackling wit, interrogating history from the vantage point of an aging (and impoverished?) woman -- Ruth is 86. Fluffy love poetry is not high on Stone's agenda, this is razor sharp and yet misleadingly simple, almost conversational, compilation of heavy themes wrapped in very light poems. If you have a thing for poetry and haven't yet read Ruth Stone, this is as good a place to start as any. If you have read her already, this review is meaningless, you already know you ought to get this anthology too.

From Inside BU: A few weeks after winning the National Book Award, poet Ruth Stone, Bartle emerita professor of English, has won the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Prize. Given annually, the $150,000 award, which was announced December 23, recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Stone, 87, said she was "stunned, humbled and made jubilant" by the recognition. In explaining why the committee chose Stone, former Vermont Poet Laureate Galway Kinnell, one of the prize's five judges, wrote: "Ruth Stone's 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. Her poems are experiences, not the record of experiences. They are events, interactions between the poet and the world. They happen - there on the page before us and within us - surprising and inevitable."