Renaming the Streets

Stone is not only a valuable physician, but a poet who is able to get his outstanding qualities of imagination and formal technique into a relationship that produces poems of great human value. - James DickeyRenaming the Streets, John Stone's third book of poems, is a work that speaks to the future but remains mindful of the endless intersection of the past and present. Stone writes about the human experience in all its seasons: if there is suffering, pain, loneliness, there is also love, mercy, humor, and, always, a sense of wonder. In ""Rosemary,"" Stone describes the vulnerability of a traveler who falls half in love with a coffee-shop waitress. When, in ""The Bass,"" a city clicker takes his son fishing and they unexpectedly catch a fish, there is not only high humor, but at the end, a sudden contemplative tone:That fish won for us a trophywhich I keep here on my deskto remind me of that morning and ofhow unexpected the end may behow hungryhow shiningRenaming the Steets is notable for its explorations within form: prose vignettes and a sonnet sequence are side by side. In the latter, the astonishing feats of the homing pigeon take on metaphorical depth:Its house as handsome as a Henry Moorea prisoner in the rounded sleep of egg . . . But then the chipping chisel of its beak, a burglar on the perfect inside job, and with a novice's display of cheek what began as instinct ends as squab.Renaming the Streets is a book of cycles and circuits. The work is all of a piece, the voice that of a mature and meticulous craftsman, a distinguished presence in American poetry.