rev. of The Art of Loss by Myrna Stone

The Art of Loss
Poems by Myrna Stone. Michigan State, $17.95 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel.

In her first book, with considerable grace and fine, lovely detail, Stone evokes her family’s world and the larger world around it, while telling stories of our perpetual waste and repair.

Any book about loss, of course, must also be about memory. In the first poem, “Simulacrum,” which acts as preface for the collection, Stone recognizes that memory doesn’t salvage loss, but rather is lost itself, and out of that loss — memory’s imperfections — art arises: “all of this lucidity even now imperfectly / preserved / what memory will call up are not these images / but a distillate: construct of mirror and shadow, / of an intimate fact illuminating one nameless moment.”

Many of these poems — especially the ones that stick close to the poet’s Ohio-based, Roman Catholic home — are themselves vividly memorable art. In them, one finds a mature poet casting a cold but loving eye on life.