Ellen Stone’s latest poetry book, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them, is both personal and mythic. Stone is a poet who writes with a lyrical precision and an empathy few are able to achieve, and she does so with an ease that invites the reader in to a complex world of grief, violence, perseverance, and love.
Parenting is a frequent theme in Stone’s work. In poems like “Killing the fish” and “Mother goes to the underworld,” she contemplates the lessons our parents leave us after they’re gone and parses what we can keep from what we should avoid repeating in our own lives as parents. There’s a refreshing, unsentimental honesty to Stone’s approach.
Take the following lines from “Killing the fish”: The fish were mild in their death / and only spoke of pond and mud // and all that time held in their cold / green world. I ate them // like a tiny prayer, or maybe less / as if I knew violence // was part of every day, what / I was given in my life (28). A father cooks a meal of fresh caught fish for his daughter, but instead of being a saccharine memory it’s a meditation on the violent phenomena no serious literature can avoid. The honest refusal to sugarcoat the uncomfortable aspects of subsistence and existence are what separate Stone’s poetry from most of the parental writing that’s out there, which can tend toward reductive self-congratulation.
In poems like “{plastic}” Stone turns from memories of her own parents to meditations on her role as a mother: I have never been a temporary mother, but there were days / I gave away my skin like wind fluff… O to be pliable, able to make- // shift, even cast off without care, but left to cover if (in order to / secure) protection is warranted (60). Nurturing, the way Stone writes it, is a protective act of sequestering the good from a world that means to harm it.
In Stone’s poetry, threats to what we nurture and hold dear are not civic abstractions but immediate interpersonal facts. Vulnerability to violence is what puts the fight in Ellen Stone’s poetics. “Girl of prey” deals directly with sexual assault and Stone’s speaker refuses to allow herself to be defined exclusively through victimhood. It’s a defiant poem that ends with the rallying cry, Instead of captive now, when light sinks down / and love caresses, my falcon heart jolts swift. / I unfold my wings, spread my talons wide (30). There are echoes of Sylvia Plath here in the startling figurations and feminist ethos.
In poems like “The oldest daughter flies to Dublin,” the reader realizes that many of the earlier poems are models for Stone’s own daughters on how to navigate a treacherous world. Stone acknowledges fear but wants her daughters to overcome it and fight back against a world that might seem stacked against them, while also preserving a sense of wonder at what remains beautiful. Thus she ends the poem on the lines, But for now, the other self, // the one her body houses full of nebulous / wonder. I hope she feels like cloud then, weightless, / with what she sees below… at once factual and dreamlike. // While she, full at the same time of doubt & precision, / a shaft of thin sharp air, knifes her way through (66).
This is a fine book whose earned and useful affirmations stay with the reader like tiny prayers in a cold green world.
Ellen Stone lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She taught special education in Ann Arbor Public Schools from kindergarten to high school for over 30 years. She is an editor for the new literary journal, Public School Poetry.
