Ordinary Words, which won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award, is an excellent specimen of Stone's art. She has a superb eye for landscape, noting both the beauty of the natural world and the dispiriting thumbprints that human beings leave behind: "As now, another snowfall / sculptures an unreality, clean and fresh, / bringing down in its light crystals / industrial particulates as it settles." This note of ecological protest, here subsumed in Latinate playfulness, can sometimes mar Stone's poetry, and the same thing might be said of her mini-manifesto against consumer culture, "Incredible Buys In." She's much stronger when delving less deliberately into what she calls "that vast / confused library, the female mind." Over and over she emerges with astonishing prizes, from the dizzy imagery of "Prefab" to the stirring snapshot of bereavement in "Then":
In our loss we accepted the strange shape of things as though it had meaning for us, as though we moved slowly over the acreage, as though the ground modulated like water. The floors and the cupboards slanted to the West, the house sinking toward the evening side of the sky. The children and I sitting together waiting, there on the back porch, the massive engine of the storm swelling up through the undergrowth, pounding toward us.