Rory Waterman reviews This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A. E. Stallings (Carcanet, 2022)
Many British readers of poetry will be new to A. E. Stallings – a sure sign of the transatlantic divide that still exists in modern anglophone poetry. Her reputation here is beginning to grow, though, and is likely to come of age very soon: This Afterlife – her first book of poems from a British, not American, press – was published late last year, and she has recently been voted the next Oxford Professor of Poetry, surprisingly beating out stiff competition from Mark Ford and Don Paterson, both of whom deserve it just as much as she does. Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Stallings moved to Greece in her twenties, and quickly came to whatever prominence poets can come to in her native country following the publication of her debut collection, Archaic Smile (1999), half of which revivifies Greek myth. She has since published three further collections – Hapax (2006), Olives (2012) and Like (2018) – as well as a number of translations from ancient Greek, modern Greek, and Latin. In a time when it is extremely unfashionable to write in rhyme and strict accentual-syllabic metres, she is one of only a small handful of avowed formalists to have some kind of popular success in the past quarter century. This book, then, is overdue – and also, or so it seems in the wake of her subsequent Oxford win, prescient.
This Afterlife selects from all of her four previous volumes, and does so a little too generously, at least in the cases of the two more recent ones, which are represented almost in full. It also contains a short selection of previously uncollected and mostly underwhelming poems, and three translations from Greek of poems by Angelos Sikelianos (twice) and George Seferis. The book’s title is taken from the last line of the opening poem, ‘A Postcard from Greece’, one of its many sonnets. The poem begins vividly, and also as conventionally as its title implies, but don’t be fooled. “Hatched from sleep”, the speaker and her companion drive along a winding cliffside: “No guardrails hemmed the road, no way to stop it, / The only warning here and there a shrine” dedicated to “those who lost their wild race with the road”:
Our car stopped on the cliff’s brow. Suddenly safe,
We clung together, shade to pagan shade,
Surprised by sunlight, air, this afterlife.
This gives a fairly good sense of how Stallings’ poems most typically unfold. They tend to be heavily metrically and linguistically controlled, yet sprightly, and almost without exception are immediately easy to understand (you might want to look up the occasional mythological reference), their complications contained in the thoughts they prompt and appear to have been prompted by. Stallings is sometimes regarded as a New Formalist, New Formslism being a specifically American movement largely committed to the adherence to highly ordered metrical models. It has a not entirely unearned reputation for sub-Georgian levels of cosy conventionality and conservatism: most New Formalist poets (exceptions apply) look up, up, a very long way up, to Robert Frost, to Elizabeth Bishop, to Richard Wilbur, to Anthony Hecht – and so do their poems.
In a time when it is extremely unfashionable to write in rhyme and strict accentual-syllabic metres, she is one of only a small handful of avowed formalists to have some kind of popular success in the past quarter century
Anyone who writes Stallings off for these failings, though, has not read her. Certainly, she has written her share of metrically conventional sonnets, triolets, villanelles and so forth, has tended until recently to favour a neat iambic pentameter, likes a well-made poem that ends with the feeling of a door clicking shut, and tends to focus on broadly conventional themes. She is also a lively if not wild experimenter within all of those parameters, which, as much as her sheer skill, sets her apart from all but the smallest handful of other (living) American formalists. Consider ‘Like’, the title poem of her 2018 collection, a sestina that takes the form’s constraint to its singular apotheosis:
But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. Like
Just twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like-
Wise props up scarecrow silences. “I’m like,
So OVER him,” I overhear. “But, like,
He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like
It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE
Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like …”
(We never find out what she’s “all like”, and who gives a shit?) Or ‘Ajar’, in both rhymed trimeter and hexameter – a metre that tends to encourage a central caesura in English anyway – which visually resembles the separation it comes to describe:
The washing machine door broke. We hand-washed for a week.
Left in the tub to soak, the angers began to reek,
And sometimes when we spoke, you said we shouldn’t speak.
Her most off-the-shelf uses of form are often stunning, too, and subtle. The sixteen-line ‘The Argument’ begins with the octave of a conventional Petrarchan sonnet. Here are the opening four lines:
After the argument, all things were strange.
They stood divided by their eloquence
Which had surprised them after so much silence.
Now there were real things to rearrange.
To make a pentameter of that fourth line, by which point in the poem that metre is firmly established, it is necessary to force hard but not unnatural stresses on both the first half of ‘real’, slowing it into two syllables, and ‘things’. Gravity. But the reader must also quicken the second ‘something’ in the fifth-from-last line of the poem, so no stress falls on ‘would’ and the line does not become hexameter. It is the quickening of an apparently irrevocable, bitter change, lives thrown off kilter, also signalled by the sudden apparent aleatory of the rhyme scheme:
Something was beginning. Something would stem
And branch from this one moment. Something made
Them each look up into the other’s eyes
Because they both were suddenly afraid
And there was no one now to comfort them.
This is remarkable poetry: organised disorganisation, complicated yet simple.
To make a pentameter of that fourth line, by which point in the poem the metre is firmly established, it is necessary to force hard but not unnatural stresses on both the first half of ‘real’, slowing it into two syllables, and ‘things’. Gravity
The same might be said of ‘Pop Music’, for one of many examples. Subtitled ‘for a new parent’, this poem is a laconically witty counterpart to Philip Larkin’s ‘Love Songs in Age’, whether or not that was the intention, though that only becomes apparent towards the end. The focus, initially, is on “The music that your son will listen to / To drive you mad”, and which “Has yet to be invented”:
As for the lyrics, or the lack thereof,
About love or about the lack of love,
Despite the heart’s reputed amputation,
They will be as repetitive as sex
Without the imagination.
One of Stallings’ more inconsequential poems would end there, or would at least end where a reader might well expect it to. Instead, it expands thematically, to be both abundantly mean and abundantly empathetic:
And while you knit another ugly sweater,
The pulsars of the brave new tunes will boom
From the hormonal miasma of his room,
Or maybe they’ll just beam into his brain—
Unheard melodies are better.
Thus it has always been. Maybe that’s why
The sappy retro soundtrack of your youth
Ambushes you sometimes in a café
At this almost-safe distance, and you weep, or nearly weep,
For all you knew of beauty, or of truth.
She can also be sharply witty about the roles frequently and enduringly ascribed to her sex, in a manner that is reminiscent of Wendy Cope. In ‘Apollo Takes Charge of His Muses’, for instance, the Muses are nine ‘quiet women’, recalling their introduction to the boss man: “Of course he was very charming, and he smiled, / Introduced himself and said he’d heard good things”. “None of us spoke or raised her hand, and questions / There were none, what has poetry to do with reason / Or the sun?” That poem is from her first collection, which most determinedly engages Greek myth, and it gives a good sense of how she does so, typically focusing on female experience and drawing the ancient into either modern life or an eternal truth.
Sometimes, though, Stallings is guilty of writing poems that really do have little consequence, such as ‘Olives’, which is twenty-five lines of nothing but rich celebration – though how rich that richness is:
Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet,
For fruits that you can eat
Only if pickled in a vat of tears—
A rich and dark and indehiscent meat
Clinging tightly to the pit—on spears
Of toothpicks, maybe, drowned beneath a tide
Of vodka and vermouth,
Rocking at the bottom of a wide,
Shallow, long-stemmed glass, and gentrified,
Or rustic, on a plate cracked like a tooth
That last line is trying too hard to find its rhyme, isn’t it? But not as hard as the archaic “I own / I’ve tried them both”, in ‘Study in White’. Nor as hard as the description of a dead garden bird in ‘Cardinal Numbers’: “all that remains – a beak of red, / And, fanned across the pavement slab, / Feathers, drab.” Nor as hard as “such a pace” and “the insect race”, describing the prey of swallows in, ahem, ‘Swallows’, which is a rhyme driven straight off a cliff and not worth commemoration with a shrine, at least according to this member of the mammal race. Such nosedives are conspicuous in part because of their infrequency here – they are sudden examples of wholly uncharacteristic inadequacy – and in part because the workings of Stallings’ poems are so readily on display and leave nowhere to hide.
The consistency of her voice – reminiscent at times of Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many more besides, but always her clear and steady own too – is remarkable
The selection has not been as selective as it might have been, then. But who could not revel in the sheer joy of her images and rhythms, even in some of the poems that don’t wholly work, or don’t do enough? The woman at a loom, “The shuttle leaping in and out, / dolphins sewing the torn ocean”. Or the islands seen from a plane that are “dribbled like pancake batter”. Or the “expert disinterested caresses” of a hairdresser. Or the “typing of the rain”. Or “a lone insect’s corrugated sound”. Or the bats in ‘Explaining an Affinity for Bats’, that “seem like something else at first – a swallow – / And move like new tunes, difficult to follow”:
That they sing—not the way the songbird sings
(Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)—
But travel by a sort of song that rings
True not in utterance, but harkenings,
Who find their way by calling into darkness
To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.
The, well, ringing of those rhymes, carried along those steady pentameters, is both empathic and emphatic, perfectly so.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Stallings notes that she has resisted making significant changes to any of the earlier poems, on the grounds that “they are the work of a different, earlier me, and it is not my place to alter her work”. Undoubtedly that is both true and untrue, as it is for any poet either side of a quarter of a century, and her subjects have in some cases changed to reflect circumstance – chiefly motherhood, which has become a leitmotif. Nevertheless, the consistency of her voice – reminiscent at times of Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many more besides, but always her clear and steady own too – is remarkable. She has loosened her grip on tight accentual-syllabic metres a little in recent books, and has developed a habit of varying metres within poems, but little else has changed; though one rarely thinks “Hey, I read a poem just like this fifty or a hundred pages back”. Long may her subtle reinventions continue.
Rory Waterman is the author of three collections from Carcanet: Tonight the Summer’s Over, which was a PBS Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award; Sarajevo Roses, shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize, and most recently Sweet Nothings. He teaches English at Nottingham Trent University, has written several books on modern and contemporary poetry, and co-edits New Walk Editions. Rory Waterman’s website is here.
