Olives

A. E. Stallings has established herself as one of the best American poets of her generation. In addition to a lively dialogue with both the contemporary and ancient culture of her adopted homeland, Greece, this new collection features poems that, in her inimitable voice, address the joys and anxieties of marriage and motherhood. This collection builds on previous accomplishments with some longer poems and sequences of greater philosophical scope, such as “On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia.” Stallings possesses the rare ability to craft precise poems that pulsate with deeply felt emotion. Like the olives of the title, the book embraces the bitter but savory fruits of the ancient tree, and the tears and sweetness we harvest in our temporary lives. These poems show Stallings in complete command of her talent, able to suggest the world in a word.

"Stallings's sweet tooth for meter, rhyme, and traditional form has earned her something of an outlier reputation in contemporary poetry. She skimps on none of these inclinations in her latest, a roving exploration of domestic and classical lives in which anagrammatic poems, sonnets, and sharp villanelles appear alongside forms as varied as fibs, etudes, and bedtime stories. Though one can hardly argue with the precision of her ear when she is nestled at home in antiquity — with a ghost ship that 'plies an inland sea. Dull/ With rust, scarred by a jagged reef. In Cyrillic, on her hull/ Is lettered Grief' — Stallings fumbles with certain of the mythologies, namely the fall of man, onto which she opens her rhyming dictionary. 'Did/ Eve,' she writes, 'believe/ or grapple/ over the apple? Eavesdropping Adam heard her say/ to the snake-oil salesman she was not born yesterday.' When she unleashes her technical gifts upon poems in which she builds a new narrative instead of building upon an old one, Stallings achieves a restrained, stark poise that is threatening even by New Formalism standards: 'After the argument, all things were strange./ They stood divided by their eloquence.../ Now there were real things to rearrange.'" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"One of the strongest talents to emerge in recent years." Poetry

A. E. Stallings has established herself as one of the best American poets of her generation. In addition to a lively dialogue with both the contemporary and ancient culture of her adopted homeland, Greece, this new collection features poems that, in her inimitable voice, address the joys and anxieties of marriage and motherhood.

A. E. Stallings has published two books of poetry, Archaic Smile (1999), which won the Richard Wilbur Award, and Hapax (Northwestern University Press, 2006), which won the Poets Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Benjamin H. Danks Award. She has also published a verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things (2007). Stallings is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Athens, Greece.

I. The Argument 

Olives 

Jigsaw Puzzle 

Recitative 

Sublunary 

Four Fibs 

The Compost Heap 

The Dress of One Occasion 

Deus Ex Machina 

Telephonophobia 

Fear of Happiness 

The Argument 

Burned 

On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia 

II. Extinction of Silence 

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Ascribed to Martin Luther 

Two Violins 

Country Song 

Sabbatical 

The Ghost Ship 

Handbook of the Foley Artist 

Extinction of Silence 

Blackbird Etude 

Lines for Turner Cassity 

Funereal Stelae: Kerameikos, Athens 

The Cenotaph 

Pop Music 

III. Three Poems for Psyche 

The Eldest Sister to Psyche 

The Boatman to Psyche on the River Styx 

Persephone to Psyche 

IV. Fairy-tale Logic 

Fairy-tale Logic 

The Catch 

Two Nursery Rhymes 

Containment 

Accident Waiting to Happen 

Dinosaur Fever 

Tulips 

Alice in the Looking Glass 

Umbrage 

Hide and Seek 

Sea Girls 

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

The Mother's Loathing of Balloons 

Another Bedtime Story 

Acknowledgements