Review by Theta Pavis
Carole Stone’s latest book Limited Editions (her sixth poetry collection) is a love song to a treasured life. Stone, a distinguished professor of English, Emerita, at Montclair State University, writes about a love that encompassed everything and the everything that must be survived after it is gone.
From the very beginning, when her date mentions Ulysses, Stone knows she’s met someone to build a life with. Through that steadfast love she finds, even when she has to transition years later into the role of caretaker, a full appreciation for all life can give us. The triumph of the collection is that the heartfelt, essential joy for living, even living through sadness, pulls us through each page.
Indeed, deep in the book, in the poem Letter to You we learn that “Nothing can ruin being alive.” In some lines we also find humor – it is part of the pleasure of our wondering at our lives and perhaps the one area the writer could have explored more. The language throughout is unadorned, but we feel the joy the writer took in her relationship.
In Long Marriage, her husband closes a book of poems by Szymborska (which, it is noted, was actually checked out of the library by the writer) and prepares to return to his gardening, but not before Stone asks a question”
“I want to know why peas need a fence to lean on./
“That’s the way it is,” you say.”
We move with the writer through early love, then its fullness, and then the grief and bewilderment of loss. Children are mentioned, but the book stays within the life of a couple and then the life of the widow. In My One, she writes:
Your death, a storm, a wasteland/I pass through, in love with the earth,
Its skies, its oceans.
In The Men Die First, Stone writes honestly about the aftermath of loss. At first she is “distant,” while others are hysterical or quiet. Later (in A Space) she will grapple with:
This thickening feeling,/ like the empty lots of my childhood.
There is such a space /to cross to where you are.”
Somehow, as she reaches to get to the other side of the grief (as in the poem Whatever It Takes) Stone returns to celebrate the everyday – the babies she enjoys cooing at during a walk in the park, a snowstorm, the simple egg in a porcelain cup. There is, too, her acceptance that she has lived a long time, and time is running out of its days for her.
Yet, as the book travels forward there is a stillness in contemplating one’s own death, calmly and with continued pleasure in the very breath of daily living.
There is a matter-of-fact sensibility in these poems that leaves the reader, perhaps somewhat like the writer, satisfied.
We feel this in a later poem titled Spine, when Stone writes, “Whatever is to come/I am glad I’ve picked these bones bare.”
Limited Editions by Carole Stone
CavanKerry Press
Nov. 2023
ISBN: 9781960327000
$18, paperback
Theta Pavis is a poet, editor and educator. Her first chapbook, The Red Strobe, will be published in 2025. Her writing has appeared in The Journal of New Jersey Poets, The Red Wheelbarrow, Mom Egg Review, Spillwords Press, Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers (HeyDay Books) and many others. She lives in Jersey City, NJ.