[bksvol-discuss] Seeing in the dark: At 89, going blind,Ruth Stone deepens her poetic vision.

"Shelley L. Rhodes" <juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> · Tue, 28 Dec 2004 22:55:13 -0500

Wichita Eagle, Kansas
Sunday, December 19, 2004

Seeing in the dark: At 89, going blind, Ruth Stone deepens her poetic 
vision.

By ARLICE DAVENPORT

"In the Dark" by Ruth Stone (Copper Canyon Press, $22)

Half-blind, it is always twilight.

The dusk of my time and the nights

are so long, and the days of my tribe

flash by, their many-colored cars

choking the air, and I lie like a shah

on my divan in this 21st century

mosque, indifferent to my folded

flesh that falls in on itself.

Ruth Stone knows that poetry is meant to be heard, not seen.

Her new book, "In the Dark," masterfully shows how poetry's elevated 
language can bring the world to vivid life, even without the gift of sight.

Indeed, when done right, poetry turns revelatory, shedding light on the 
ever-encroaching darkness of our mortality and calling forth what lies 
hidden in shadow:

Then why this happiness in muted things?

Some equation of time and space,

a slowed perception of the battered brain

strips back like leaves to unexpected glittering.

Two of the Western world's greatest poets knew this power firsthand: Homer 
and John Milton both ended their lives blind. Now Stone seems likely to join 
them.

At 89, steadily losing her eyesight, she has mined a rich artistic vision 
from her disability. "In the Dark," arguably her strongest book, maps the 
uneasy encounter between cosmos and self, the quest to find a lasting 
meaning in the intricacies of the mundane.

Her only tool of discovery, she tells us, is language:

Having come this far

with a handful of alphabet,

I am forced,

with these few blocks,

to invent the universe.

The universe of "In the Dark" builds brilliantly on the success of "In the 
Next Galaxy," which won the National Book Award in 2002 and introduced Stone 
to a wider reading public.

That recognition was a long time coming. Stone has been writing poetry for 
nearly 50 years, but her earlier work was overshadowed by her male peers. 
Then her personal world was shattered when her husband committed suicide.

As she fought to recover from this loss, raising three daughters on a farm 
in Vermont, she cultivated an ear for the startling phrase and incisive 
existential detail.

Tuesday and I am still in the coils

of this serpent masking as a vein.

It has swallowed so much. I am the half-

swallowed toad still kicking in the throat.

Stone's diction has also ripened with age: spare, elemental, intrinsically 
rhythmic. Her poems sound the depths of everyday experience but resonate 
with a dreamlike intensity.

Even so, there is no easy optimism in "In the Dark," no pat reconciliation 
of infinity and mortality.

O language that follows like the comet's tail;

the rubble of senseless longing

for what was.

Such longing can be the stuff of hope, however. And as cosmos and self 
circle each other in Stone's poetics of encounter, we watch our own vision 
grow richer and brighter because of her courageous seeing in the dark.

Reach Arlice Davenport at 268-6256 or adavenport@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/entertainment/books/10449643.htm

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