Ruth Stone - Telegraph Although she could produce rapturous pastoral poetry and dark feminist satire, a single tragedy dominated much of her work, and most of her life. In 1959 her second husband, the poet and novelist Walter Stone, hanged himself on the back of a door. Ruth Stone was left with three daughters (one from a previous marriage). The suicide came in the same year that Ruth Stone published her first volume, In an Iridescent Time. The need to provide for her children led her to teach in a string of universities, with frequent changes of addresses. As a result a good handful of her poems concern highly variable landlords, including Mr Tempesta ("He screams, 'No pets! No pets!"") and Mr Garvey ("Mr Garvey, who never fixes anything, tells me old window glass is frail"). Her claims in later years, that poems would simply come to her, could seem like modesty. As she wrote in her last collection: "I would feel them coming. / I would rush into the house, / looking for paper and pencil. / It had to be quick, for they passed through me / and were gone forever." And yet the poems about her husband and his death came from further away. This presence of death is murky in her earlier work, but the pain of loss becomes sharper in later collections, particularly in Second-Hand Coat (1987). By the time of her last collection, she had lived with the grief so long that she was able to condense her feelings into short, rhymed lines based on an acrostic of his name. Ruth Swan Stone was born on June 9 1915 at Roanoke, Virginia. Her father, Roger Perkins, was a drummer and a drinker, and the family led an itinerant musician's life; it was Ruth's mother who introduced her to poetry, by reading her Tennyson. Ruth Stone would later attribute her feel for metre to both influences. Her early, highly formal work won prizes and appeared in The New York Times. Her first marriage, to a chemist, led her to Illinois when she was 19. After this relationship broke down, she met Walter Stone at a liberal arts college. The couple flourished: Ruth's work appeared in The New Yorker and won prizes. But her husband's suicide silenced her, both as a poet and a person: "Having to endure and be strong for my daughters altered me," she recalled. I couldn't cry, but I didn't talk for a year either. Her next collection, Topography and Other Poems, would not appear until 1971; but this second volume was already the work of a mature poet. The voice was surer, the influences less obvious. The candour and curiosity could sometimes be reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, but Ruth Stone still succeeded in her goal of finding "a different way to write." The result was a powerfully physical poetry, and an ability to confront both joy and grief full on. Having had many visiting professorships, including one at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, Ruth Jones finally secured tenure at the age of 75, when she joined the State University of New York in 1990. Suddenly she was flooded with awards, among them the National Book Award in 2002 (when she was 87); in 2009 she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, for What Love Comes To. Her last work was among her best. When she was almost without sight, she would read it to visitors with the text held so close that her face almost touched the page. Although she had no formal faith, and was deeply read in science, she wrote: "I do not doubt that all things are possible, / Even that wildest hope that we may meet beyond the grave." She is survived by her three daughters . Ruth Stone, born June 9 1915, died November 19 2011