Ruth Stone
Ruth Stone was was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1915 and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She lived in a rural farmhouse in Vermont for much of her life and received widespread recognition relatively late with the publication of Ordinary Words (1999). The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was soon followed by other award-winning collections, including In the Next Galaxy(2002), winner of the National Book Award; In the Dark (2004); and What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems (2008), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Stone’s compact lyrics are known for their accuracy, strangeness, and ability to speak to domestic concerns and metaphysical problems at once. Witty and wry, her poems strike “a tragic/comic register few other American poets have struck,” noted Chard deNiord in the Guardian. He described Stone’s work as “often reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s double-edged verse, only in a more conversational style.” The poet Sandra Gilbert, an early champion of Stone’s, noted that the “special boldness” of Stone’s poetry is “at least in part a product of the pain and loss she’s had to confront, the perilous life she’s lived at the edge of comforts most other people of letters take for granted in our society … her extraordinary words are among those that will flow through the valley of our saying from here to there, from now to then, into the farthest reaches of the twenty-first century and beyond.”
