SOURCE: Gilbert, Roger. “Ruth Stone's Intricate Simplicities.” The Iowa Review 26, no. 3 (fall 1996): 179-93.

In the following review, the author addresses the reasons for Stone's relative obscurity—her lack of connection to academia, her lateness in starting her poetic career, her refusal to conform to expectations—and praises Stone for her “virtuoso range of subject, tone and technique.”

Ruth Stone's Simplicity is the kind of book one might expect from a great poet just hitting her stride, eagerly testing the full range of her powers for the first time. Its 116 pages—unusually generous for a book of poems these days—embrace a dazzling array of genres, styles, forms, while the poems themselves touch every conceivable tone of feeling from grief to fury, ribaldry to tenderness. All this expansive energy may be misleading, however: Ruth Stone turned eighty last year. Only a very few poets have written at their peak...