It has taken me a little while, but last week I finally found time to read work by American poet Ruth Stone, specifically her collection Simplicity (1995). Stone died in her nineties in 2011, after becoming more well known relatively late in her career (more details on the Poetry Foundation website). Stone is an immediately engaging presence, writing out of everyday life, but unafraid to address the fundamental issues of human existence head-on, with a humour and lack of sentimentality that feel hard won in the face of her own experience, which was marked in particular by the suicide of her second husband in 1959 (several of the poems in Simplicity make reference to this).
I came to Stone's poetry (and hope to read more of it) as a result of the kind gift of a new anthology edited by Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery, Salt on the Wind: Poetry in Response to Ruth Stone (Elephant's Footprint). I'm not going to offer a full-scale review of the anthology here, although it does contain many very fine poems (my particular favourite has to be Cristina Navazo-Eguia Newton's 'Dog', but there are numerous others I could recommend). What I like most about the book that Helen and Chaucer have put together is that it is not a straightforward homage. Stone herself is not strongly present as an individual in the book. Rather, it is her writing and teaching which provide the starting-point for a diverse range of poems. There are interesting notes at the back of the book where the poets talk about how they came to write what they did, and these are testament to the many forms that influence can take, how - in their own mind - poets often fashion subterranean connections to the work of others. Apart from the enjoyment of the poems themselves, the anthology as a whole provides a fascinating demonstration of the true value of literary influence - not as slavish imitation, but as a dialogue in which we take up where others have let off, but selectively, personally, and always making something new with what we find. Given the recent scandals in the world of poetry over the plagiaristic use of models from others, this volume could be recommended as a primer in the creative possibilities of engaging with the work of other poets. The poems are more than worthy of engaging with in their own right, but will also serve as an invitation to get to know the work of Stone herself.
