An aging poet’s failing eyesight informs this collection … some of which recall the spirit of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Dark but not hopeless, they spring from Stone’s lucid inner vision, which is straightforward, musical, and defiant. -Utne

Now available in paperback, In the Dark, winner of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, is Ruth Stone’s follow-up to her National Book Award–winning In the Next Galaxy. Personal issues of memory, aging, and loss are balanced against profound political and cultural change. Stone has been called a people’s poet whose work is profoundly rewarding, and she writes a poetry of everyday life that recasts the mundane as indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age, Stone, then eighty-nine, replied: There’s no question.
From What is a Poem? :

Having come this far with a handful of alphabet, I am forced, with these few blocks, to invent the universe.