From AwardAnnals
| Book: | What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems |
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| Author: | Ruth Stone |
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| Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
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What Love Comes To gathers nearly half a century of poems from a National Book Award-winning poet who, over the course of her career, has written in a wide range of voices and forms. Drawing from eleven previous volumes, this collection offers a trajectory through that career, presenting Ruth Stone from her early formal lyrics, through fierce feminist and political poems, to her most recent meditations on blindness and aging. Stone, at age ninety-two, returns often to the theme of loss in her work, all the while maintaining what the Vermont poet laureate nominations committee calls “a sense of survival surpassing poverty and grief…. Her poetry’s irrepressible humor and intellectual curiosity are unique among contemporary American poets.”
What Love Comes To is the perfect entry point into Stone’s world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance.
“We may pull down the shades in order to get on with things, but [Ruth] Stone pulls them up to remind us that the real stuff of life isn’t about to disappear.”-The New York Times Book Review
When I forget to weep,
I hear the peeping tree toads
creeping up the bark.
Love lies asleep
and dreams that everything
is in its golden net;
and I am caught there, too,
when I forget.
