[In the following essay, O'Connor argues that Stone is a “sneakily political poet” who uses sly humor to comment upon imbalances of power, trivial materialism, violence, and lack of compassion.]

Skewed, funny, rueful, lyrical, shocking, wise—a new collection of poems by Ruth Stone is an occasion of import. There is so much that this poet sees and understands that we need to know. She shows us both what is so mundane as to be obscured by familiarity, and so unfamiliar as to require the intuitive leap of an original and brilliant poetic mind. She also shows us who and what we don't want to see, and acknowledges the price (and rewards) of looking. And I believe that her relentless and sometimes terrible occupation of observing, seeing, and writing is urgently necessary to us. Because she entertains us, making us laugh and weep; because she is never self-congratulatory, didactic, sentimental, or smug; because she puts herself under the same magnifying glass as everybody and everything else; and because she is honest, she can get away with giving us some pretty outrageous truths about ourselves and the world we've made and agreed to live in. “How poor we are” to let the precious now run through our fingers, she says to herself and to us in “Good Advice.” We are like the joyful dog in “So What's Wrong,” “living in the dust” on a short chain with a vague sense of the “green world” of “something, / somewhere … so wonderful” that we remember in our muscles at night when we lie down to sleep.

Stone seems more keenly aware than ever of the urgent necessity of our opening up—and responding—to all that the world offers on a daily basis, to that enormous range. She is unflinchingly committed to whatever vision will reveal. If it's “violent chaos at the pure brutal heart,” she wants to know it, to see it, and to tell us about it. She is unafraid to be heretical: it is the Devil who reminds us we are in paradise, to come and eat in “Good Advice”; or shocking: “Henry James … spread his impotence into language. / He went on and on and couldn't cum.” But she is also tender in the beautiful, delicate, and complex poems like “The Trinity,” or “Strands,” which weaves itself out of the poet's contemplation of strands of marsh grass to become a poem about the connectedness of the generations of women in her family. She is emphathetic: “Patience” grows out of her reflection on a newspaper item about a newlywed couple killed by a coral snake in their sleeping bag on their first night in the desert; and she possesses a remarkable ability to inhabit “others,” like the grandparent in the Happyvale School program in “An Education in the Eighties,” as well as often seeing herself as a doppleganger who “if she'd lie down in the snow / that angel would be a stranger / but a likable fool” (“Ventriloquist”).

Stone's concern for “others” leads her to dislodge barriers, to connect, to wonder about, to envision the particulars of daily lives, especially those of women: Shizu in “Earthquake,” or the woman going to work in “Echoes and Shadows,” or the sweat laborer in “Incredible Buys In.” In “On the Street,” the poet describes a homeless woman, easy to pass by each day, “wrapped as for a funeral pyre.” In fact, it is dangerous to stop, to hesitate, because “If you allow yourself to look closer / you see her … If you hesitate / you are sucked into a chalice of saints and miracles.” To stop and really look requires that we attend to what we have previously ignored: “the body's / unexpected lush response / to all you have hidden from yourself.” Ruth Stone is always calling upon us to stop and look, to slow down and see—that panty hose on the clothesline is the “lotus foot of the West” (“Western Purdah, Inc.”), that the plastic bottles holding the spring water we drink have “had a past … brought forth / in batches of plastic syrup” that rise “to circle the planet” with their poisons (“Bottled Water”), that t.v. ads for Coke are part of “the same old shell game even the Egyptians / and the Sumerians knew” (“Boom”).

One might say that Ruth Stone is a sneakily political poet. She is always providing cultural critique, commenting on imbalances of power, especially those expressed through gender. She has for years been writing poems which confront our myopically materialist culture, our preoccupation with the trivial, our violence and lack of compassion … but she never goes out on a diatribe. She notices the absurdities most of all and includes herself in the analysis. The plastic bottles which spark her meditation in “Bottled Water,” sit empty in her own kitchen, the water having “poured through my kidneys / and down the t-bowl into the sewage plant.” In “Boom” she points out that the “old shell game” Baby Boomers are “caught in” she too has known, first hand: “Aunt Maud was addicted when Coke was real / down in the smeared-over violent South” where “We weren't allowed to touch it. But we did.” She often performs her critique through the medium of humor and story. At a diner where “the male chorus line” has taken up all the counter seats and the waitress “doesn't brown my fries,” as she is too busy with the men to pay attention to a woman customer, the poet observes “the twenty-three silverbacks” as a truly alien species. But her tone is gently confused: “They are methodically browsing / in their own territory,” and the poet, having thus observed the whole scene, puts this data “into that vast / confused library, the female mind” (“Male Gorillas”).

Stone is particularly sympathetic to and knowledgeable of the plight of women in our world, and critical of what might be called “male culture”: military, violent, authoritarian. And in this volume she is more direct than ever in confronting issues of male violence and exploitation (See “How They Got Her to Quiet Down,” “Earthquake,” “Sorting It Out,” “Reading,” “In the Arboretum,” and many others). Her critique is based on social facts. In “Absence Proves Nothing,” a remarkable poem composed of questions and reversals, the poet states a simple truth, as tragic in its consequences for men as for women: “Because of men, women translate fear. / Thus all women present subliminally. / That the killer did not come last night / proves nothing.” But this poet also tells us of “Uncle Cal's Southern-male nickering” over the sick child in “Boom,” and in “In the Arboretum” the “whole community, most of them on welfare, living in trailers” go out to search for a disappeared eight-year-old girl. Stone is fully aware of the complexities, and ready to extend her compassion. In “Unspeakable,” “Gus,” beaten by his father and sent to bed without dinner as a child, grows up to take over his father's stove business. He “advertises over the local radio … the warmth of home.”

And this poet's curiosity, keen understanding, and sympathies have always extended beyond family, friends, acquaintances, and her own culture. In “At the Museum, 1938” the “sacred messages” of a Navaho rug and the “significant beads” whose significance has been lost, are on display: “without annotation / the legend meaningless, reduced to artifact.” One senses that Stone mourns these losses as she would mourn the death of kin. She has, in fact, always extended further, well beyond the range of the human species. In this volume, that sense of connection ranges even to the amoeba (“Empathy Again”). And in the remarkable prose poem “In the Arboretum,” she draws us into her contemplation of a young hawk, stranded on his first flight, and goes on to ruminate on territory and ownership and the survival of species (including poets and children), and to connect her concerns about the young hawk to the disappearance of—and all-out search for—the raped and murdered young girl in her home state of Vermont. It is a far ranging, intricate, and deeply moving piece that subtly questions the priorities upon which we have built our society.

In addition to challenging the daily violence and inequities that we live with, Stone challenges the boundaries of accepted wisdom—Wallace Steven's dictum that “A poet looks at the world / as a man looks at a woman,” which Stone turns on its head according to its own logic. She challenges the very nature of boundaries, of opposites: self and other, inside and outside, laughter and sadness—and in this sense she comes at what has been a subject of postmodern theoretical inquiry from an entirely different route. One begins to suspect that the boundary between self and other might be as fluid as the one she writes of in “Summing It Up,” a brilliant and funny poem where the outside and inside, “natural enemies” are shown to be constantly merging and changing places, not opposites at all. In such poems as “Incredible Buys In,” we understand that the woman imagined by the poet, “the maker / the sweat-laborer,” is “sleeping … deep in the soft ooze of the poet's cortex”; that Shizu, who each morning rises early before she must go to work at her husband's vegetable stand in order to draw, to “free herself,” is “one grain of sand / in the rippling ground swell” of an earthquake (“Earthquake”).

One reason that Stone writes so skillfully of “others” is that, in addition to her sharp and empathetic interest in everything and everybody, she understands the value of eccentricity in others and in herself (See the widely anthologized “Song of Absinthe Granny” from her Cheap). She draws on her own background, relatives, and way of life, appreciating and respecting the originality, wisdom, and humor she finds there. And while resembling in certain ways the patient plumber she heroizes in Simplicity, envisioning him as a young god with wrenches, gifted in his quiet ability to accept the way things are, Stone is just as likely to be dizzying and urgent, loud, and zany about “the way things are” as to tell a quiet story. Several poems in this volume produce the laughing out-loud effect. In addition to a couple of her delightful and provocative “Mother Stone” story poems, “Can Cranes Cogitate” and “Yes, Think,” “Uncle Cal” tells us excitedly about the days of celluloid collars. (“Uncle Cal on Fashions”) and in “Vermont Nature” the poet's sister winds up with a bear crossing sign above her bed. When Stone enters the territory of the eccentric other in stories of neighbors on the mountain like the bear-hunting plumber George of “Vermont Nature,” or the “regular people” who appear in “I Meet Them” or “At McDonald's in Rutland” or “Sitcom on the Greyhound in Rutland, Vermont,” we know that she knows what she's talking about.

Stone's poems are always so complex, though, that one can never say that a poem is about a single subject, is funny, or serious. So often, a Ruth Stone poem takes you through a range of emotional territory. Sometimes you're laughing and crying at the same time (See especially her “Who Is the Widow's Muse?”), and sometimes a lighthearted beginning captivates with its humor, then gradually reveals itself to be serious, even tragic. Or vice versa. I think this is because for her “the great truths are laced with hysteria” (“So What,” my emphasis). She sees things in a complete way, a way that doesn't separate out as if they were distinguishable humor, happiness, sadness, grief, anger, the ridiculous, and the sublime. So everything is present in the poems. This strikes me as remarkable because so few artists seem to do it. What is funny in poetry, seems often to be devalued as “light” or un-serious, when really the opposite can be true, as in Ruth Stone's work. For example, in “Never,” the poem which begins by outrageously skewering Henry James for “‘spreading’ his impotence into language,” the poet goes on to say of the sensualist Proust, on the other hand:

… only one lying for years
remembering could make
every moment into an hour,
the immortal flesh.

—an act of making clearly admired by the poet, who has herself for years been “lying … remembering” her dead husband Walter, “making” his flesh immortal, often by way of descriptions of decrepitude and decay. Her “poor / handful of dust” (“Ventriloquist”) remains an ongoing part of her dialogue—“dig[ging] him up” she calls it in “Message from Your Toes” in her Second-Hand Coat.

Some of the poems in this volume that remember Walter present brief, poignant visions of a particular time and place. “1941” recalls a customary afternoon in a coffee shop in Indianapolis, “with our / serious game on paper.” The poet comments that “It wasn't much.” But we know it was everything, for the light now grows less for her, and the world begins to disintegrate “into the arms of [her] total happiness”—as if only disintegration into a rejoined state could make her truly happy. And in “Romance” the narrator returns to a scene of earlier happiness, both asking “Why did I think I could drag it all back,” and remembering the sweet images of the lost past landscape (now “heavy” with shopping malls). The “fields under clouds / puffed like the French phrases / he kissed me with” describe the scene “where he and I lay whispering / the most important nonsense …”

In poems like “Then” the memory of a particular summer storm rushing up from the orchard leads the narrator to meditate on the forms grief and loss take and on how we shape their meaning. She says to the dead husband, “My trouble was that I could not keep you dead” because he returns in all manner of guises—the ermine who takes up residence and watches from the kitchen shelf, as well as the storm itself, “pounding toward” the widow and children sitting on the back porch, with “the house sinking toward the evening side of the sky.” Stone writes, “In our loss we accepted the strange shape of things / as though it had a meaning for us,” knowing that “the strange shape of things” does have meaning. One feels the presence of the lost husband in the ermine watching from the shelf and in the storm “swelling up through the undergrowth” as visitation. At the same time, the poet calls her own (and our) attention to the fact that we create meaning from the “strange shapes” we perceive and encounter. To this committed artistic mind, vision is both received as gift and created.

Ruth Stone writes about vision often in Ordinary Words. In “This,” vision is a “glaze”; it is “fragmented”—“confetti caught in the updraft; / dark photograph of the penumbra.” Sometimes it is only possible in the “Echoes and Shadows” or in “The Dark.” In “Up There,” it is “quick,” formed of “a transient thing.” And the subject of the paradoxes of vision and language, a kind of poetics of artistic creation, is addressed in several of these poems. “Never,” with its play on the meanings of “lying,” acknowledges the relationship between “lying,” “remembering,” and “making,” and in “The Trade-Off” the poet writes, “Words make the thoughts”—and that they are “tyrants.” The complicated truth about language that we (especially writers) must live with is knowing that “all that is uttered in its chains / is locked out from the secret.” And yet, though words “herd your visions / down the ramp … waiting with sledgehammers / to knock what is the knowing / without knowing into knowledge,” still the poet must do the best she can with the ways we apprehend and shape the “strange shapes” of vision and meaning and knowledge via words that in some way manage to unlock the secret in spite of their limitations. It is because she is so truthful about such complexities—and because she gets words to perform such amazing feats and miracles—that I trust this poet so implicitly.

There is another, not unrelated, sense in which Stone is a visionary poet. She has visions. “Up There,” for instance is a poem which both presents a vision and is itself about vision. The poet vividly imagines Belshazzar's walled garden, the “hot blue” above; “the fractals of sand” outside, yellow and striated “in riffles”; the lovers' “rouged feet”; the tended pomegranates; the restless, tethered, harem … But we understand that we must look above this picture, into the “transient thing,” the vapor in “the fathoms / overhead,” into “mirage, a visionary oasis” in order to become “transfixed” “open-mouthed” seers below. Vision here is a creative act of seeing—quick and mutable, providing a glimpse. But complex realities of inequality inform this vision. That the “tenuous wavelength” is available to “all … whose eyes were not gouged out” reminds us of the possible price of daring to look up, to imagine a different, possible world.

One senses in this volume a feeling of urgency that perhaps comes in part from the poet's looking toward a fulfillment of the time allotted to her poetic task. In “When,” the narrator imagines the return of a death figure she addresses as “iron maiden, jaws of despair.” But in quiet triumph the narrator imagines that the “fat” old woman the narrator has lived on will be empty when the iron maiden returns. Like “the door to the cellar standing open,” no body will remain to be tortured, “only the wind's body will be there.” The narrator / old woman will have escaped the clutches of the “cruel jaws of despair” by being “thrifty,” using up and using wisely, leaving only wind behind the cellar door.

In the collection's final poem, “Prayer of Descending Order,” the stanzas spiral downward in a stunning statement of this poet's themes and their emptying, from the shedding of hair in the present setting of radiated Binghamton, NY, and the aging of feet “thick with calluses,” to the embracing of the metaphorical and literal “You” “who lie within, / between each word … who chew the air / ravenous for my breath,” descending to the level of mites, and other “blessed monsters of the subworld,” and below, those “angelic choirs” cleansing and shitting, becoming (descendingly) purified “by those less and less”—it's a kind of Jain hymn in praise of emptiness as spiritual fulfillment.