This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A. E. Stallings

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022
213 pp., $28

A. E. Stallings—perhaps America’s best living poet—doesn’t live in America. She moved to Greece in 1999, the year her first book, Archaic Smile, was published. And she’s used that combination of American and European, ancient and modern, to fine effect in poems that bring together the classical and contemporary worlds with cleverness and insight. She’s written about Hank Williams, freight trains, and Facebook—and about Apollo, Penelope, and Medea. She’s written on the joys and frustrations of married life and motherhood—and translated Hesiod and Lucretius. And she’s done this in some of the most perfectly designed lyrics of the 21st century—poems that sparkle with ingenuity and glow with understanding. Now, in This Afterlife, she has assembled her best work into an anthology that no one who still believes in poetry’s power to move, persuade, and surprise should miss.

One of Stallings’s trademarks is her blend of ancient mythology and modern experiences. This often results in verse that is moving and, well, a little spooky. In “Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother,” for example, she imagines what the goddess kidnapped by Hades and forced to reign as Queen of the Dead would tell her family about residing underground. She complains that her hair gets tangled in tree roots and that moles never bring news from the surface. Such petty annoyances gradually give way to the deep tragedy of a beautiful girl lost too soon from the mortal world. Stallings hardly needs to explain that this metaphor of bereavement captures the loneliness real people often feel:

Please send flowers. I am forgetting them.
If I yank them down by the roots, they lose their petals
And smell of compost. (7)

Similarly, in “Crazy to Hear the Tale Again (The Fall of Troy),” she imagines what the Trojans felt as they witnessed fate turn against them and saw their city being demolished by the Greeks (17). She envisions their sensation of betrayal in terms that the denizens of Hiroshima or Berlin may have experienced in the 1940s:

. . . there were horrors hinted in that night.
I thought a veil was parted from my eyes
And thought I saw our gods, of monstrous size,
Splash barefoot in our blood, and with delight.

If these examples give the impression that Stallings’s poems are all morose, that isn’t true. On the contrary, she often merges myth and reality in ways that evoke more benevolent feelings. Take “Arachne Gives Thanks to Athena.” According to legend, Athena grew jealous of Arachne’s weaving skills and got revenge by transforming the woman into a spider. But in Stallings’s version, the victim has not only made peace with her fate but come to love it:

I, if not beautiful, am beauty’s maker.
Old age cannot rob me, nor cowardly lovers. . . .
Here are the lines I pulled from my own belly—
Hang them with rainbows, ice, dewdrops. (22)

As these quotations reveal, readers will best appreciate Stallings’s work if they brush up on Greek legends first. But even those who come unprepared will find her writing sweet and intense. And many of her poems are not based on ancient classics. Among her best is “Tulips,” in which the narrator, like Arachne, sounds a note of magnanimity and grace as she finds in the swift wilting of flowers a lesson to create beauty while one can:

Something about the way they twist
As if to catch the last applause,
And drink the moment through long straws. . . .
The tulips make the other me . . .
Glance now over the wrong shoulder
To watch them get a little older
And give themselves up to the light. (99)

Today’s poets often choose ingenuity over depth. And even more often, they take the opposite path: expressing mere emotion without paying attention to technique. But Stallings weds her perceptiveness with a technical expertise that sometimes blossoms in unusual and startling forms. “Alice in the Looking Glass,” for example, is designed as a mirror: the last word of each line is an antonym of a corresponding end-word below, so that the poem—which is about looking at a reflection—forms a kind of mirror in the middle line. Another poem, “First Love: A Quiz,” is written as a multiple-choice examination. It riffs on the weird romantic liaisons between the ancient Greek gods while exploring the intersection of sex appeal and youthful danger.

Equally brilliant is “Four Fibs,” which is based on the Fibonacci Sequence of numbers (each in the series being the sum of the two previous: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.); successive lines in each stanza are that many syllables long. This is no mere gimmick, however, because Stallings uses the form to discuss lying (hence, “fibs”), particularly the mythical first lie in the Garden of Eden. When Adam, Eve, and the serpent are caught stealing the apple, they plead their innocence, and God is unpersuaded:

Not
me,
not me!
cried all three.
“You shall creep the earth.
And you shall labor giving birth.
And as for you, you shall toil and sweat for all you’re worth.”

With its punning and its smart melding of style and substance, the poem seems to fall perfectly into place at the end, to land on point like a prima ballerina.

W. H. Auden said a good lyric poem is like an algebraic equation, which the poet solves for an unknown variable. He meant that a successful poem sets up a sequence of thought in the reader’s mind so that he feels himself drawing his own conclusions—at just the instant, and in just the manner, that the poet has planned. The result is an almost telepathic union between artist and audience. At her best, Stallings’s poems are carved with just such precision that this quality of aptness can leave a reader stunned—or laughing, not at their humor (although some are quite funny) but at the cleverness of their architecture.

Not only is that architecture one of Stallings’s most appealing qualities, but it also makes her rare among contemporary poets. Beginning in the 1960s, the poetry community largely abandoned the art form’s characteristic techniques—and, as Dana Gioia observed in his now-classic book Can Poetry Matter?, readers retaliated by largely abandoning poetry itself. A few generations ago, writers such as James Whitcomb Riley, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost were celebrities, but today, most Americans probably could not name a single living poet.

Gioia explained that there are three reasons for this withering away: first was the “confessional” movement, which encouraged poets to write self-indulgently about their own personal experiences, especially painful or depressing ones, rather than to communicate ideas and feelings readers could share. This led writers to prioritize self-expression over self-control and made poems into embarrassing rants instead of a form of stylized communication.

Second was the poetry community’s abandonment of form in preference for a free verse that became so “free” it lost its poetic character. Rejecting rhyme, meter, and other techniques, today’s “poets” often produce what is effectively prose with line breaks, not poetry. Open at random an issue of such leading journals as Poetry or Rattle today, and one is less likely to encounter a sonnet or a sestina than a tirade (likely political; possibly incoherent) with no actual poetic effect. One can hardly blame readers for losing interest.

The third cause of poetry’s decline was its institutionalization. Today’s poets are increasingly likely to be professors or graduate students, isolated from contemporary culture in ways no previous generation of lyricists ever was. Meanwhile, some categories of poetry (Gioia pointed specifically to rap and cowboy poetry) sell millions of albums and draw huge crowds at festivals—which proves that people crave the rhymes and rhythms of traditional verse. Yet the “official” poetry world tends to shun these elements of the art. That leaves professional poets talking to each other instead of to the public—who find their work intimidating, incomprehensible, or irrelevant.

Gioia’s book, published in 1992, helped spark a revival of interest in classic poetic styles—the so-called New Formalist movement. Stallings shies away from that term, preferring “retro-formalist,” in part to emphasize her rejection of “dogmatic agendas” in poetry, but New Formalism did at least succeed in making publishers more receptive to writers who practice longstanding poetic techniques.¹ The art form, however, remains dominated by antiformalist and subjectivist writers who downplay the importance of discipline and skill, or even view these things as politically reactionary. The December 2020 issue of Poetry, for example, featured an anti-Israel diatribe titled “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” which included such lines as “I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.” (Its author received a fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.)

Stallings is by no means artistically (or politically) conservative, but her combination of dexterity and understanding, of form and content, enables her to straddle the line between the high culture of today’s official “poetry establishment” and the world of actual readers. On one hand, she received a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and a Guggenheim Fellowship, publishes in Poetry, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. On the other hand, her work features an accessible vocabulary, employs traditional methods, and frequently focuses on normal family experiences instead of the political propaganda on which contemporary verse so often fixates. That’s why her poems are not transitory rants but lasting works of art that speak to readers of diverse backgrounds. The fact that she has been awarded some of the highest honors a writer can receive, and is now published by the respected firm of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is a welcome sign that today’s culture still has room for an artisan of genuine skill. In fact, we even hear an echo of the concerns that animated the New Formalist movement in “The Rosehead Nail,” in which the narrator watches a blacksmith and ruminates on his craft:

By dint of hammer-song he makes his keen,
Raw point, and crowns utility with rose. . . .
. . . The boy’s
Blonde mother shifts and coughs. Once Work was wed
To Loveliness—sweet-faced, swarthy from soot, he
Reminds us with the old saw he employs
(And doesn’t miss a beat): “Smoke follows beauty.” (162)

In recent years, Stallings has shown less inclination to feature ancient mythology in her poems. Apart from her writing, she spends her time assisting Middle Eastern expatriates who have fled to Greece in the wake of the Syrian Civil War. This, and the childhoods of her son and daughter, have come to play a more prominent role in her work. For example, in “Glitter,” from her 2018 book Like, she mused on the sparkly mess her daughter leaves on everything in the house. While cleaning it up, Stallings reflects (if that pun can be pardoned) on how the shining flakes of plastic are just “The broken mirror Time will not restore, / The way your daughter marks you as her own” (130).

Domestic poems such as these led the New Criterion’s poetry critic, William Logan, to accuse Stallings of having lost her edge. In a review of Like, he called such lyrics “drab” and “trivial.”² And it’s true that after reading about the incest and bloodthirst of the ancient gods, a poem about a broken washing machine (“Ajar”) or an iron skillet ruined by scrubbing (“Cast Irony”) can seem anticlimactic. But though they may be mellower in tone, these middle-age poems serve as a fine prelude to her heartbreaking commentaries on the Syrian refugee crisis, particularly “Empathy.” Lying in bed beside her husband, the narrator compares her domestic happiness with the suffering of people fleeing the brutal miseries of war and ends on a line all the more affecting for its seeming simplicity:

My love, I’m grateful tonight
Our listing bed isn’t a raft
Precariously adrift
As we dodge the coast guard light. . . .
I’m glad our six-year-old daughter,
Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor
In the bottom bunk. . . .
It’s not being nice
To say I would pay any price
Not to be those who’d die to be us.

Stallings’s distinctive poetry succeeds because it merges a conscientious focus on meaningful content—saying relevant and powerful things about human experiences—with a painstaking attention to formal design. The results are masterpieces of integration, that, so to speak, combine the head and heart. “What has poetry to do with reason / Or the sun?,” asks a character in one of her early poems (16). In This Afterlife, Stallings gives us her triumphant answer: everything.

About Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur is vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute and is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard.

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