She's not afraid of the surface detail because it's part of how she situates us. Her prosody is evident from the lines above too, the occasional or internal rhymes, the short line and loping rhythms that give the poems fullness and form. The love poems are evocative and poignant, but they're few. They are written to her husband who died as a very young man. Here and there are poems of local color, as well, folksy tales of Vermont life, but with an edge, the stories of dysfunction that show true damage, especially to the young.
Pregnancy is important, motherhood and giving birth, protecting the newly born, the innocent.
Stone never lets the reader forget that these are the poems of a woman. They are strongly environmentalist, message-y, in a way that nothing else here is. Odd, in such a carefully structured collection where poems all along seem paired on facing pages. Yet nothing can mar the brilliance of this quirky, extra-ordinary collection, the best of Stone, so far. Poems New and Selected .