Ordinary Words

In the now abandoned race to find the next Virginia Hamilton Adair, one might have overlooked Stone, who, with 10 other books and numerous awards, has been here all along. Her 11th, with its unprepossessing title, is well worth discovering, consistent and forthright in its explorations of the quotidian and the dream-life it can produce. Writing of ""this sly shadow of too much knowing,"" the poet takes us through ""cities scattered like a deal of cards/...As I run on miraculous hooves/ from the wooden pen. As I run/ through the market street squealing.// This glaze of vision fragmented,/ confetti caught in the updraft;/ dark photograph of the penumbra."" If poems like ""1941"" (about an interracial dalliance) don't quite find the tense language they seek, others are studded with socio-political zingers: ""My middle-class beauty, testing itself,/ discovered the dull dregs of ordinary marriage."" Stone often writes as aging observer, commenting wrly on a boring, line-up-at-the-counter existence; she laments the past's inability to break its frame-or her own inability to keep her late middle-aged daughters (""in over their hips"") from falling into it. But Stone's other characters, with a contagious hope, look out with ""worn eyes/ and see the bright new Pleiades."" The ordinary, for Stone, turns out to be more than enough. (Aug.)