Reviews for In the Next Galaxy

The average rating for In the Next Galaxy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-08 00:00:00 David Horbach The author is a very old woman in 2002 when this book came out. She was born in Virginia in 1915, before the U.S. involvement in World War I. She won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2002 for this book or perhaps for her body of work. She'd already won many other major awards in the past. At some point during the production of this book Stone lost her sight and her daughter Abigail did the corrections and proofreading, reading aloud to her mother. Stone's Wikipedia entry records a conversation she had with the journalist and novelist Elizabeth Gilbert in which Stone relates the experience of "catching a poem.""As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming...cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, "run like hell" to the house as she would be chased by this poem. The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would "continue on across the landscape looking for another poet". And then there were these times, there were moments where she would almost miss it. She is running to the house and is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her. She grabs a pencil just as it's going through her and she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In those instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first." If you would like to hear Gilbert relate this conversation, please listen to Gilbert's TED talk in which she talks about where creativity comes from. This is one of Stone's poems from this book:Seed Corn is universal, so like a Roman senator. Its truths are silk tassels. True its ears are sometimes rotten, impure. But it aspires in vast acres, to conspire with every pollinator and to bear for the future in its yellow hair. And what are your aspirations, oh my dears, who will wear into tatters like the dry sheaves left standing, stuttering in November's wind; my Indian corn, my maize, my seeds for a ruined world. Oh my daughters. Ruth Stone published thirteen books of poetry. She died in 2011.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-07 00:00:00 Carlo Tamez Over the weekend, I was staying at a bed & breakfast in Vermont (motto: "Keep Vermont green. Bring money."). I brought along the ample complete collection of Wislawa Szymborska to finish, only I woke at 4:30 Saturday morning, got up, went down to the library, and polished it off with the coming of Vermont dawn. Now without a book of my own, I explored the shelves of the B&B's rather impressive library. There I found a collection by a poet I did not know: In the Next Galaxy by Ruth Stone. She was there because she was a Vermont poet, only recently dead after some 90 years on the planet. What a find it was! As I had to put it back once we left, I cannot quote it, but she wrote mostly one-page poems (my style) and her knack for insight into human nature was uncanny stuff. In short, the word choice wowed me and I said, "I have to read more of Ruth Stone -- sooner rather than later!" And I will. And I hope you take the time to meet her, too, if she is as unfamiliar to you as she was to me....