Simplicity

"Stone's work is alternately witty, bawdy, touching, and profound. But never pompous. Her honesty and originality give her writing a sense of youth and newness because she looks at the world so clearly, without all the detritus of social convention the rest of us pick up along the way.... Her writing proves her to be simply inspired."

~USA Today

"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 is';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

""By turns sly, subtle, exuberant, poignant, bawdy and bitter, and always unflinchingly hones, 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

""Ruth Stone's seeing eye is clear, her voice as complex and simple as life is. Like the woman in her poems, she has gone deep and brought back a message. Listen.""

~Lucille Clifton

""Stone's work is alternately witty, bawdy, touching, and profound. But never pompous. Her honesty and originality give her writing a sense of youth and newness because she looks at the world so clearly, without all the detritus of social convention the rest of us pick up along the way. Her writing proves her to be simply inspired.""

~USA Today

""Simplicity, Ruth Stone's tenth book, is deceptive in title and appearance — its cool blue cover — since it is a wild, wide book haunted by what William James calls the 'buzzing, blooming' of life, and all its ghosts; the voice of neighbors and highways, photons, fields of corn (I ear what you say). Sperm and egg converse, as does a dead husband... She has a wicked sense of humor, about poetry: 'A bulletin from the poetry factory says/ we like our images stuck on with mortician's was' and about people, herself included.There is also great beauty in this collection, and a brilliance of imagery that comes from seeing the world freshly and clearly: '. An empty parking lot/ passive as the hide of a sleeping amoeba,' 'a June flush of leaves and wild mustard.' Above all, Stone's poetry speaks about and on behalf of love, which marries particles, photons, neutrons, the smallest particles alive, moving and connected. 'Love also takes its shape/ from climate,/ the workhorse of the world;/ and yet, so delicate.'""

~THE BOSTON GLOBE