Books by Mississippi Writers 1996-2010
Preview
Creation Date
11-1-1998
Description
By John Stone Louisiana State University Press (Hardcover, $22.95, ISBN: 0807123269; Paperback, $12.95, ISBN: 0807123277, 11/1998) Galumphing meters and strained rhymes used to distinguish amateurish poetry, but since the confessional poetry of the 1950s, earnest, diary-like prosiness has been its hallmark. Stone, a physician, may be an amateur poet, writing about the kinds of things one would ponder in a diary and inserting prose memoirs among the poems, but he isn't amateurish. He uses meter and rhyme very skillfully, and he knows how to involve us in the events of his life by saying what they were and how he experienced them rather than how he feels about them. Here, those events include living on after his wife's too-early death, spending Halloween in a third-floor hotel room whose sliding door opens on thin air, exchanging songs with a mockingbird, noticing a big soap bubble floating through highway traffic, and doing without running water during a weekend at a getaway cabin. All are vivid, as if they were our experiences as well as Stone's, and perhaps they are. Review by Ray Olson. ―Copyright © 1998, American Library Association.
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