This Afterlife
Selected Poems
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
A selection of sharp, witty, and impeccably crafted poems from A. E. Stallings, the award-winning poet and translator.
This Afterlife: Selected Poems brings together poetry from A. E. Stallings’s four acclaimed collections, Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like, as well as a lagniappe of outlier poems. Over time, themes and characters reappear, speaking to one another across years and experience, creating a complex music of harmony, dissonance, and counterpoint. The Underworld and the Afterlife, ancient history and the archaeology of the here and now, all slant rhyme with one another. Many of these poems unfold in the mytho-domestic sphere, through the eyes of Penelope or Pandora, Alice in Wonderland or the poet herself. Fulfilling the promise of the energy and sprezzatura of Stallings’s earliest collection, her later technical accomplishments rise to meet the richness of lived experience: of marriage and motherhood, of a life lived in another language and country, of aging and mortality. Her chosen home of Greece adds layers of urgency to her fascination with Greek mythology; living in an epicenter of contemporary crises means current events and ancient history are always rubbing shoulders in her poems.
Expert at traditional received forms, Stallings is also a poet of restless experiment, in cat’s-cradle rhyme schemes, nonce stanzas, supple free verse, thematic variation, and metaphysical conceits. The pleasure of these poems, fierce and witty, melancholy and wise, lies in a timeless precision that will outlast the fickleness of fashion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this generous selected, translator and poet Stallings (Like) gathers poems from her first four books, as well as previously uncollected poems and translations of George Seferis and Angelos Sikilianos. Spanning 25 years, the oeuvre proves consistent in its adherence to metered rhyme and unabashed allegiance to Greco-Roman sources ("I bow to the yoke/ of making" and "I am/ doctor not of medicine,/ but Latinity," the poet asserts). Readers unversed in classical philology and linguistics may find themselves reaching for a dictionary: "Paradigmatic summers that decline/ Like singular archaic nouns"; "He cursed in the fricative,/ The way she could not act./ Or live in the indicative,/ Only contrary to fact." Persona poems abound, fixed especially on female figures from Western myth, while a poem addressed to "women poets" suggests a dual identification: "You who are both Orpheus/ And She he left in Hell." In "Jigsaw Puzzle" she writes: "Slowly you restore/ The fractured world and start/ To re-create an afternoon before/ It fell apart" Aesthetic and intellectual pleasures are everywhere in this considerable work.