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John Stone “is clearly a poet to watch,” wrote Choice magazine in 1973 of Stone’s first book of poems, The Smell of Matches. In two succeeding collections, In All This Rain (1980) and Renaming the Streets (1985), Stone has more than fulfilled that early prediction of promise. The Smell of Matches has been out of print for some time, and so it is with pleasure that LSU Press makes that book available once again. As in the later books, the poems in The Smell of Matches show a sustained preoccupation with two central aspects of the poet’s life. Stone is a physician, and his medical training and practice supply the themes of many of the poems. They are balanced by others celebrating the private and family life. The language of his poetry is distinctive for its concern with the ways in which his two worlds come together. His joy in his young sons is rich and gentle, whether captured in a description of bedtime games or of playing Little League soccer, when he trots to the sidelines to huddle tall with my teammates
and my son,
sweaty, tired, proud as a bruise. And for whatever sadness there is, he has fashioned a personal voodoo doll, to which he relegates Red threads of worry for your eyes,
the sleeplessness and deep tattoo of
wrinkles, the pain. In every poem, Stone displays deep compassion as well as finely honed technical skill
John Stone is also the author of the poetry volumes Renaming the Streets, In All This Rain, Where Water Begins, and Music from Apartment 8; and the essay collection In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine. He is coeditor of On Doctoring, an anthology of literature and medicine that since 1991 has been presented to every student entering a U.S. medical school as a gift from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He wrote the libretto for the choral symphony Canticles of Time and performed in 2001 at Carnegie Hall in a program titled “The Poet and the Pianist.” Now professor of medicine (cardiology) emeritus at Emory University School of Medicine, he was for nineteen years director of admissions and associate dean at the school. He has read, lectured, and taught at over one hundred institutions in thirty-nine states and in England.
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