Simplicity

“Ruth Stone’s seeing eye is clear, her voice as complex and simple as life is. Like the woman in her poem ‘Isolation,’ she has gone deep and brought back a message. Listen.” LUCILLE CLIFTON

“By turns sly, subtle, exuberant, poignant, bawdy and bitter – and always unflinchingly honest – Ruth Stone’s Simplicity is anything but simple. In poems of daring and complexity, Stone tells the truths of love and grief, examines the politics of past and future, plunges through Einstein’s cosmos…. She is one of poetry’s wise women, one of our age’s fiercest, purest, most original poets.” SANDRA M. GILBERT

“Around Ruth Stone’s profound, passionate, lucid, and funny poems is a benign silence. Though her listeners and readers are legendary, America’s Anna Akhmatova remains a solitary mountain tree, removed from the business of American poetry, the secret great poet of the English language. Let’s not worry why at eighty she isn’t immediately known as our living T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, or Elizabeth Bishop. Rather let us atone by reading, hearing, and absorbing the irridescence of her poems in Simplicity. Then literary history will laugh at our belated recognition and wisdom.” WILLIS BARNSTONE

Ruth Stone was born in 1915 in Roanoke, Virginia. Her numerous honors include the Bunting Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Delmore Schwartz Award, Shelley Memorial Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (for Ordinary Words), and the National Book Award. She lives in Vermont.