In "Connections", one of the new poems in this absorbing New and Selected, Ruth Stone describes the process of making those leaps that are central to her work: how the eye sees something that passes into the brain "Packet by packet / Along the ledge over the abyss / Between the lobes" to come back "freighted with the universe".

This gives some suggestion of the scale on which Stone has been working for the past 50 years: at one end, something as tangible as a spider's web; at the other, the entire cosmos. And, like the fractals of which she is so fond, those two extremes are mutually enlightening, self-similar: "this clutter of rocks, dust, / and lighter elements, like your fingernails; / like the configurations of the spiral lines / on the soles of your feet, / undeciphered." Invoking such an explicitly vast and scientific context, Stone seems to have been influenced as much by the eastern Europeans as she has by her compatriots. Wislawa Szymborska in particular comes to mind: they share an attractive compound of shrewdness, mischief and wonder, and, beyond those immediate effects, the shadow of a sorrow so enormous it has its own gravitational field, all of which seem to put human endeavour back in its proper place.

Stone's work, however, filters these qualities through a brisk, self-sufficient, distinctly American sensibility, one which sees prairies, leghorns, housecoats and dyed yellow butter take their rightful place among the atoms and the stars. Various aunts appear and disappear; someone catches a train in Chicago; people live tenaciously in trailers, with their "beaten / defeated patch of grass" and "rectangular minds". Such details have a welcome grounding effect - as Stone puts it: "For me, the great truths are laced with hysteria. / How many Einsteins can we tolerate?"

But that seemingly modest little phrase "for me" is not just there to soften a grand statement: it has another, more intimate meaning. During her first marriage, to a "boring chemist", she fell for the writer Walter Stone, whom she later married; but he committed suicide in 1959, the year of Stone's first collection, when the couple and their daughters were living in England. Ever since, Stone has written robustly and without self-pity about her widowhood, which soon exceeded in years the length of the original relationship - as she puts it: "we have lived together longer / in the discontinuous films of my sleep / than we did in our warm parasitical bodies" - and a significant portion of her work, including many of her most affecting poems, are based on memories of her late husband, on the act of remembering itself. In "Codicil", she recalls their stay in a peculiar guest-house run by a widow who had reluctantly inherited her husband's egg collection: "Eggs, eggs, eggs in secret muted shapes in my head; / Hundreds of unborn wizened eggs. / I think about them when I think of you". These eggs are more than just emblems of her too-short marriage, her husband's interrupted life: they may also be the shells of Stone's unwritten poems, elbowed from the nest by loss.

But lest anyone might think it distinctively unfeminist to obsess about your partner at the expense of your own work, it is vital to emphasise that, for Stone, the two are not exclusive. As she puts it (contra Stevens), "The poet looks at the world / as a woman looks at a man." There is a broad, powerful streak of independence - even disobedience - that runs through Stone's writing and has inspired a great number of women after her, not least Sharon Olds, who provides the breathless introduction to this book. Poems such as "Pokeberries" and "Names" have taken due place in the great creative rush toward progress. In Stone's depictions of creativity and gestation, too, the teeming squirm of the planet seems to insist upon the centrality of women, and upon the younger generations as the "seeds" of what is to come. "Corn is universal", she writes; "it aspires in vast acres":

And what are your aspirations,

oh my dears,

who will wear into tatters

like the dry sheaves

left standing, shuttering

in November's wind:

my Indian corn, my maize,

my seeds for a ruined world;

Oh my daughters.

Stone has seen huge shifts in her lifetime, and this delicate poem is full of anxiety about what those shifts might mean for the future, rattling through the corn in a single wave, so that sex, agriculture, commodification and choice become - as they are - entangled with each another.

But it is a comparatively rare moment in which Stone permits herself to use her long life's experience to complain about now and then. She much prefers to revel in progress, as in "Plumbing", where a young man fixing her lavatory makes her feel "like some rich Roman matron / who has just been loved by a boy"; or to linger thoughtfully over the very idea of change, in a pleasantly changeable way, as if she is trying in the same breath to convince herself of the absence of Walter and to prove that, in an imaginative sense at least, he is not and never will be gone. As she writes in "Train Ride", "All things come to an end; / small calves in Arkansas, / the bend of the muddy river. / Do all things come to an end? / No, they go on forever."

 Frances Leviston's Public Dream is published by Picador.