Ordinary Words

by Ruth Stone

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Recipient of The Academy of American Poets Eric Mathieu King Award

"In direct, plain language, Stone fashions a poetry that is neither encumbered by decorative artifice nor burdened by the obscurity so often cited as a complaint against contemporary poetry. Stone's tone is rarely ironic, her diction never flat. She balances the formal aspects of her poems with the necessity of her subject matter: observations of everyday life, the pain of lost love, the passing of generations of relations, and the peregrinations of an octogenarian at century's end. . . . In a world so desperate for voices to instruct troubled souls, Ruth Stone's poetry is a reminder of the beauty in pain and loss, and the extraordinary in ordinary words. . . . Readers of good, straightforward poetry are missing out if they have not yet come across the work of Ruth Stone."
— The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Call her brilliant, call her prolific--just don't call her 'octogenarian'. 'That's a put-down' in this culture, says poet Ruth Stone of press coverage that typically led with her age (84) in trumpeting her latest professional achievement--winning the respected National Book Critics Circle Award for her 11th book, Ordinary Words (paperback, Paris Press, 1999). . . . There is a place for poetry in our hurry-up, dot.com world, says Stone, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton. 'I speak to my students about this universe we carry around on our shoulders--this head, which has in it everything we've ever seen or read or experienced,' says Stone. 'When you allow your mind to speak to you [through writing], it is one of the greatest things human beings do."
— AARP Bulletin