This Afterlife: Selected Poems

by A. E. Stallings

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374607838
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/05/2023
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	272,755
Product dimensions:	6.05(w) x 8.95(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

A. E. Stallings is the author of several books of poetry: Like, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Olives, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax, winner of the Poets’ Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award; and Archaic Smile, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. She has also published verse translations of Lucretius’s The Nature of Things and Hesiod’s Works and Days, as well as the Homeric epic The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice. Stallings is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2011 United States Artists Fellow, and a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Athens, Greece.

Table of Contents

From Archaie Smile (1999)

A Postcard from Greece 3

Hades Welcomes His Bride 4

Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother 6

Eurydice's Footnote 9

How the Demons Were Assimilated & Became Productive Citizens 10

Cardinal Numbers 11

A Lament for the Dead Pets of Our Childhood 13

Homecoming 14

Consolation for Tamar 15

Apollo Takes Charge of His Muses 16

Crazy to Hear the Tale Again (The Fall of Troy) 17

Medea, Homesick 18

The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles 19

Tour of the Labyrinth 20

Daphne 21

Arachne Gives Thanks to Athena 22

The Mistake 23

The Tantrum 24

Fishing 25

Study in White 26

The Machines Mourn the Passing of People 27

The Man Who Wouldn't Plant Willow Trees 28

From Hapax (2006)

Aftershocks 31

The Dollhouse 32

Lovejoy Street 34

Sine Qua Non 35

Last Will 36

Arrowhead Hunting 37

Ubi Sunt Lament for the Eccentric Museums of My Childhood 38

Thyme 40

The Charioteer 41

Asphodel 43

An Ancient Dog Grave, Unearthed During Construction of the Athens Metro 44

The Modern Greek for "Nightmare" Is Ephialtes 45

Dead Language Lesson 46

First Love: A Quiz 47

"To Speke of Wo That Is in Mariage" 49

Fragment 50

Evil Eye 51

Empty Icon Frame 52

Bouzouki, from Exile: Picture Postcards 54

Explaining an Affinity for Bats 55

Another Lullaby for Insomniacs 56

Lullaby Near the Railroad Tracks 57

Song for the Women Poets 58

Jet Lag 59

Clean Monday 60

Prelude 61

Ultrasound 63

From Olives (2012)

Olives 67

Jigsaw Puzzle 68

Recitative 69

Sublunary 70

Four Fibs 72

Deus Ex Machina 74

Telephonophobia 75

The Argument 76

Burned 77

On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia 78

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Ascribed to Martin Luther 81

Two Violins 82

The Ghost Ship 84

Handbook of the Foley Artist 85

Extinction of Silence 87

The Cenotaph 88

Pop Music 91

Persephone to Psyche, from Three Poems for Psyche 93

Fairy-Tale Logic 94

The Catch 95

Containment 96

Accident Waiting to Happen 97

Tulips 99

Alice in the Looking Glass 100

Umbrage 101

Hide and Seek 102

Sea Girls 103

Listening to Peter and the Wolf with Jason, Aged Three 104

The Mother's Loathing of Balloons 106

Another Bedtime Story 109

OLIVES 110

From Like (2018)

After a Greek Proverb 113

Ajar 114

Alice, Bewildered 115

Art Monster 116

Cast Irony 118

Colony Collapse Disorder 120

Denouement 121

Dyeing the Easter Eggs 123

Empathy 124

Epic Simile 126

First Miracle 127

For Atalanta 128

Glitter 130

Half of an Epic Simile Not Found in Hesiod 131

The Last Carousel 132

Like, the Sestina 134

Lost and Found 136

Memorial (Mnemosyno) 154

Momentary 155

Pencil 156

Placebo 158

Appendix A Useful Phrases in Arabic, Farsi/Dari, and Greek, from Refugee Fugue 159

The Rosehead Nail 162

Scissors 163

Sea Urchins 164

Selvage 166

Shattered 167

Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda 169

Silence 170

Book Omega, from Similes, Suitors 171

The Stain 172

Sunset, Wings 175

Swallows 176

Whethering 178

"Lagniappe" of Uncollected Poems (1999-2017)

Fear of Happiness 181

Chairs 182

Song: The Rivers of Hell 183

Jack-O'-Lanterns 185

Mosaic Once Depicting Arianist Saints 187

The Magi 189

After Reading the Biography Savage Beauty 190

Daphne, After 191

The Barnacle 192

Learning to Read Greek 193

The Arsenic Hour 194

Uncollected Translations

Yannis Keats, by Angelos Sikelianos 197

Frieze, by Angelos Sikelianos 200

Upon a Line of Foreign Verse, by George Seferis 201

Acknowledgments 207

Index of Titles and First Lines 209

Editorial Reviews

Named a Best Poetry Collection of 2022 by The Washington Post and The Times (UK)

"A.E. Stallings is that rare poet who can write in a traditional form (sonnets! sestinas!) without letting the form squeeze the life out of the poem. “This Afterlife,” which selects from more than two decades of work, solidifies her virtuoso status. Much of the pleasure comes from her precise, imaginative eye." —Troy Jollimore, Washington Post

"Stallings’s work imagines the poet as an artisan, and her poems satisfy in the way a handblown glass bowl satisfies; they have heft and shape; they rest solidly in the palm." —David Orr, New York Times Book Review

"Perhaps America’s best living poet . . . In This Afterlife, [Stallings] 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." —Timothy Sandefur, The Objective Standard

"In the poems collected in This Afterlife—especially the ones set in the here and now—Stallings demonstrates that in the right poet’s hands, the putative everydayness of the hic et nunc can be transformed into something every bit as rich and strange as even the most ancient myths." —Ryan Ruby, The Nation

"Stallings’s formal ingenuity lends a music to her philosophically and narratively compelling verse. She [crafts] clever yet profound meditations on love, motherhood, language, and time. A particular pleasure is seeing certain personae—Persephone, Daphne, and Alice (of Wonderland)—recur throughout, accompanied by ever-deepening resonances." —The New Yorker

"Stallings’s new book, This Afterlife: Selected Poems, is a major event . . . Poems are either memorable or not, and This Afterlife is loaded with the real stuff, the right stuff, the kind of lines you remember." —Jason Guriel, Air Mail

"Technically assured . . . profound and disturbing . . . [This Afterlife] should introduce Stallings’s mastery to a wider public." —Graeme Richardson, The Times (UK)

"One of the . . . most consistently excellent poets writing today . . . Stallings's poems . . . offer us the hard-won fruits of suffering and loss, a wisdom cured in tears." —Jeffrey Bilbro, Plough

“Rooted in Athens for more than twenty years, the American-born Stallings has not forgotten the song that imbued her earlier work. If anything, her variations on myth and reflections on the modern world around her, with its overlapping crises, have grown at once more intricate and more assured.” —Boris Dralyuk, The Times Literary Supplement

"In the realm of contemporary formal poetry, Stallings is an Olympic-level athlete, and this mid-career retrospective demonstrates how she has been redefining the field for over two decades . . . This new career-spanning collection shows us both Stallings’ range and her depth, her intelligence, and her heart." —Erica Reid, The Colorado Review

"Aesthetic and intellectual pleasures are everywhere in this considerable work." —Publishers Weekly

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