This is the oldest topic of conversation and the latest. The lack of complaint in these poems is notable. She is not writing to start an argument, or to finish one. We lose someone, we separate, our love is not fully returned. These things happen.
Love poetry is too important a form to be ceded to troubadors with recording contracts.
J ean Stone died while Occasions for Comment was being published. The presentation of this volume, a limited edition in red hardcover and blue jacket would, we can hope, have pleased her. These poems, written since the formation of the Young Street Poets group in 1979, reflect a long life and memory, and an attractive gift for understatement as the feather-light, almost offhand, title implies. Of course there is a kind of understatement that comes from having little to say. Stone's is the thinking kind, deliberately restrained.