16. Ruth Stone †

Ruth Stone, die amerikanische Dichterin, „deren bittersüße Stimme ihres Humors und Pathos wegen in Erinnerung blieb“, starb im Alter von 96 Jahren. Zitat aus dem Nachruf von Chard deNiord, Guardian 27.11.:

After the failure of her first marriage, she married Walter Stone in 1945. In addition to their busy family life of raising three daughters, and Walter’s responsibilities as an English professor at Vassar College, the couple wrote poetry and fiction, critiquing each other’s work and achieving early success with publication in the New Yorker and the Kenyon Review.

Stone published her first book of poetry, In An Iridescent Time, in 1958, shortly after buying her lifelong home in Goshen with the money she received for the Bess Hokin prize for poetry. The young couple seemed poised to make a meteoric rise in the literary world at the onset of the 60s when, on sabbatical leave in London, Walter hanged himself from the coat hook on the door of his study, leaving no note. For the rest of her life, Stone wrote with both searing realism and deep pathos about the loss, describing his death in her poem March 15, 1998:

Tied a silk cord around his meat neck
and hung his meat body, loved though it was,
in order to insure absolute quiet,
on the back of a rented door in Soho.

When recalling her love for Walter, she found more tender language in Tenacity (1971):

I sit for hours at the window
Preparing a letter; you are coming toward me,
We are balanced like dancers in memory,
I feel your coat, I smell your clothes,
Your tobacco, you almost touch me.