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Poet and cardiologist John Stone is a man of many voices. A gifted verse maker, he exhibits in his writing the qualities of a compassionate physician, a musician, linguist, naturalist, and down-to-earth yet whimsical grandfather, son, husband, and brother. Selections from four previous books together with twenty-two new works compose this exquisite volume, a “best of the best” sampling from a beloved poet.
Stone’s new poems include humorous and sometimes tough adventures with his ninety-five-year-old mother (she makes the music that wafts from Apartment 8), an exciting sequence drawn from a felicitous yet daunting trip to the Middle East, and reflections on growing up in Mississippi and Texas that begin with puberty and end in a Paris amusement park. Earlier works show Stone immersed in his sons’ soccer practice; teaching, from Atlanta to Oxford; attending at the bedside of patients; and sometimes simply turning his attention toward the everyday. He hears the music of Mozart, sees the light in a Hopper painting, and experiences a joy that inspires his own work. “Like the voyages of Columbus,” he writes, “poetry consists less of finding / what you set out to find, than in learning to live / with what you've stumbled across.”
The inimitable voices of John Stone resound in Music from Apartment 8. Whether listening by phone to his gurgling baby granddaughter a thousand miles away or to his mother's plan for her “whole new life,” he is a poet who hears, and speaks every language of the heart.
Poem on an Accidental Xerox of Her Hand
for Delese Wear
Dermatoglyphics is the fancy name
for the gentle science of reading palms
or, for that matter, soles: anywhere
genetics takes its chances and leaves lines.
Fortune-tellers make whole lives of such
cutaneous meanderings, of course
taking the intersections of the world
as each presents itself, heart in hand.
I could have used some palmistry today:
A woman in Ohio, sending poems,
xeroxed not only the poet’s finest frenzy,
but also, at the upper left, her hand.
That is the wondrous way the world may happen—
you start to do one thing and do another.
Up to now I haven’t read the poem.
I’ve only sat here hoping to say sooth,
trying to glean a message from this map,
life line, love line, shape of her own sweet time.
La Ci Darem La Mano* hums through my head.
For having seen their tracery in the air,
five slender ministers practicing their Braille,
I swear by the metacarpal hills of fortune
I would have known these fingers anywhere.
————
*There we will take each other by the hand
“Poem on an Accidental Xerox of Her Hand” published in Music from Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems by John Stone. Copyright © 2004 by John Stone. All rights reserved.
John Stone is also the author of the poetry volumes The Smell of Matches, In All This Rain, Renaming the Streets,and Where Water Begins; 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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