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Archaic Smile
Archaic Smile, by A.E. Stallings, recipient of the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award, uniquely juxtaposes poetic meditations on mythological themes with poems about the everyday occurances of contemporary life -- such as losing an umbrella or fishing with one's father. In doing so, Archaic Smile continually bridges the gap between these two distant but interrelated worlds with striking insights. James Dickey, having praised the author's accomplished critical skills, also points out that she has "the most indispensable quality that a poet must have: an original way of looking at things." A.R. Ammons aptly characterizes the power of her mythological poems in his comments on "Apollo Takes Charge of His Muses" which he chose for The Best American Poetry: "It delivers the ancient past into our present with such astonishing justness that I'm silenced with appreciation." Archaic Smile is a powerful debut collection by a provacative poet who has found strikingly original ways to personalize our myths and conjure the deep significances of our everyday life.
- GenresPoetryRetellingsAmerican
69 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1999
179 people want to read
About the author
A.E. Stallings
30 books99 followersAlicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American poet and translator. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
Stallings was born and raised in Decatur, Georgia and studied classics at the University of Georgia, and the University of Oxford. She is an editor with the Atlanta Review. In 1999, Stallings moved to Athens, Greece and has lived there ever since. She is the Poetry Program Director of the Athens Centre. She is married to John Psaropoulos, who is the editor of the Athens News.
Stallings' poetry uses traditional forms, and she has been associated with the New Formalism.
She is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to Poetry magazine. She has published three books of original verse, Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), and Olives (2012). In 2007 she published a verse translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things).
Stallings was born and raised in Decatur, Georgia and studied classics at the University of Georgia, and the University of Oxford. She is an editor with the Atlanta Review. In 1999, Stallings moved to Athens, Greece and has lived there ever since. She is the Poetry Program Director of the Athens Centre. She is married to John Psaropoulos, who is the editor of the Athens News.
Stallings' poetry uses traditional forms, and she has been associated with the New Formalism.
She is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to Poetry magazine. She has published three books of original verse, Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), and Olives (2012). In 2007 she published a verse translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things).
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
October 5, 2021
A.E. Stallings’ first book of poems. It is not an easy book to find, but it was worth the $60 I paid for it. The poems are precise, crafted, and down to earth. She writes of nature in the same hard and clear-eyed vision of Ted Hughes and delivers it with the soft beauty of Richard Wilbur. The best formalist writing today.
November 28, 2011
This is Stallings' debut; it displays her ongoing love affair with the classics, both the myths and their retelling as well as with classically formal poetry (which she often delightfully and cleverly tweaks to suit her own ends). Archaic Smile is divided into 4 sections: Underworld, A Bestiary, Tour of the Labyrinth, and For the Losers of Things. I found that every section had its clear winners, but that overall, the poems in the last section were the least universally compelling (though still very well-crafted; Stallings' poems are clearly faceted, sparkling gems).
Even Stallings' "weak" poems are better than most; so, when I say the "weakest" are, to me, mostly in the last section of the book, I generally mean poems that don't stick in the mind or strike some major musical or emotional chord. I find that overall, her persona poems and classical references tend to be stronger than her (apparently) more personal poems. These do, however, get more interesting and more mature, in her 2nd book, Hapax.
The book opens with a well-constructed sonnet (more of a "personal" poem, but refreshingly surprising -- I read it 3 times before I continued on to the next one!), which is immediately followed by one of my personal favorites, a persona poem entitled "Hades Welcomes His Bride", which has an appropriately sinister, yet fairy-tale like sensibility to it. The next few poems in section 1 deal also with Persephone, Eurydice, and Death. I wanted more of these.
Section 2, "A Bestiary", focuses on observations about animals. These are all good, and seem to have a slight inflection of Elisabeth Bishop here and there. However, though the poems are each little gems, few of them resonated with me on a more personal or universal emotional level. (Two exceptions below).
Section 3, "Tour of the Labyrinth", goes on to such subjects as Apollo, Medea, Ariadne, Daphne, Arachne, and the Minotaur (another of my favorites). These are well-done and full of striking imagery.
The last section, though containing plenty of perfectly crafted poems, sometimes feels as if the poet were simply trying out different writing exercises. The poems delight in the use of language; often they're astonishingly well fit-together, like intricate puzzles that dazzle, but they don't surprise as often as I'd have liked (The Man Who Wouldn't Plant Willow Trees is an exception).
Overall, these are very good poems, ranging into the sphere of excellent. The book displays Stallings' obvious intelligence and talent, as well as her near-obsession with antiquity (her undergraduate degree is in Classics, and she lives in Athens). If you're not familiar with her work, I'd read Hapax first, but this book is a definite keeper for my shelf, since I'm a fan of her work in general.
My favorites:
Hades Welcomes His Bride (page 9)
Words of Prey
Elegy for a Loggerhead Turtle Washed up on a South Carolina Beach
Tour of the Labyrinth
The Man Who Wouldn't Plant Willow Trees (toward middle of interview)
Where We Moved To
Even Stallings' "weak" poems are better than most; so, when I say the "weakest" are, to me, mostly in the last section of the book, I generally mean poems that don't stick in the mind or strike some major musical or emotional chord. I find that overall, her persona poems and classical references tend to be stronger than her (apparently) more personal poems. These do, however, get more interesting and more mature, in her 2nd book, Hapax.
The book opens with a well-constructed sonnet (more of a "personal" poem, but refreshingly surprising -- I read it 3 times before I continued on to the next one!), which is immediately followed by one of my personal favorites, a persona poem entitled "Hades Welcomes His Bride", which has an appropriately sinister, yet fairy-tale like sensibility to it. The next few poems in section 1 deal also with Persephone, Eurydice, and Death. I wanted more of these.
Section 2, "A Bestiary", focuses on observations about animals. These are all good, and seem to have a slight inflection of Elisabeth Bishop here and there. However, though the poems are each little gems, few of them resonated with me on a more personal or universal emotional level. (Two exceptions below).
Section 3, "Tour of the Labyrinth", goes on to such subjects as Apollo, Medea, Ariadne, Daphne, Arachne, and the Minotaur (another of my favorites). These are well-done and full of striking imagery.
The last section, though containing plenty of perfectly crafted poems, sometimes feels as if the poet were simply trying out different writing exercises. The poems delight in the use of language; often they're astonishingly well fit-together, like intricate puzzles that dazzle, but they don't surprise as often as I'd have liked (The Man Who Wouldn't Plant Willow Trees is an exception).
Overall, these are very good poems, ranging into the sphere of excellent. The book displays Stallings' obvious intelligence and talent, as well as her near-obsession with antiquity (her undergraduate degree is in Classics, and she lives in Athens). If you're not familiar with her work, I'd read Hapax first, but this book is a definite keeper for my shelf, since I'm a fan of her work in general.
My favorites:
Hades Welcomes His Bride (page 9)
Words of Prey
Elegy for a Loggerhead Turtle Washed up on a South Carolina Beach
Tour of the Labyrinth
The Man Who Wouldn't Plant Willow Trees (toward middle of interview)
Where We Moved To
Read
March 3, 2024For the Losers of Things was such a beautiful section
“The Poet’s Dream of Herself as a Young Girl” — movement out of viewing the mind and heart through the lens of fragility, delicacy, weakness (there’s so many more words that would fit here)— lands on concrete images — all that the heart and mind are capable of withstanding — “But the heart is not an egg / That breaks once and forever; / It’s a dog that learns to beg // For bones dropped on the floor, / To lick up spilt milk there / Curdled with tears, to adore / From the shelter under a chair”
“But the brain is not a box / Inlaid with galaxies; / It’s the steel trap and the fox // Gnawing it’s foot to escape / While buzzards dial the sky”
——
(!!!) “Homecoming” is in this collection — “It was as if she pulled a thread, / Each time he saw her, that unraveled / All the distance he had travelled ….”
—
“A Lament for the Dead Pets of Our Childhood” — “After the death of pets, dolls lay too still / And wooden in the cradle, sister, after / We learned death: not hell, no ghosts or angels, / But a cold thing in the image of a warm thing, / Limp as sleep without the twitch of dream” (I keep returning to the line “a cold thing in the image of a warm thing” — it is so striking)
“The Poet’s Dream of Herself as a Young Girl” — movement out of viewing the mind and heart through the lens of fragility, delicacy, weakness (there’s so many more words that would fit here)— lands on concrete images — all that the heart and mind are capable of withstanding — “But the heart is not an egg / That breaks once and forever; / It’s a dog that learns to beg // For bones dropped on the floor, / To lick up spilt milk there / Curdled with tears, to adore / From the shelter under a chair”
“But the brain is not a box / Inlaid with galaxies; / It’s the steel trap and the fox // Gnawing it’s foot to escape / While buzzards dial the sky”
——
(!!!) “Homecoming” is in this collection — “It was as if she pulled a thread, / Each time he saw her, that unraveled / All the distance he had travelled ….”
—
“A Lament for the Dead Pets of Our Childhood” — “After the death of pets, dolls lay too still / And wooden in the cradle, sister, after / We learned death: not hell, no ghosts or angels, / But a cold thing in the image of a warm thing, / Limp as sleep without the twitch of dream” (I keep returning to the line “a cold thing in the image of a warm thing” — it is so striking)
October 14, 2012
Stallings is a remarkable poet, a deft formalist where much of contemporary poetry is at best free verse and at worse personal effusion without even a hint of song or lyric. In large measure these poems speak in the voice of one or another character from Greek mythology -- Hades introducing Persephone to the underworld, or Persephone writing a letter to her mother, or Penelope caustically tormenting the returned Odysseus. To the extent Stallings can be compared, she makes me think of Auden, and then possibly Richard Wilbur, but her voice is hers and hers alone.
February 2, 2023
The first poem grabbed me -- recounting a near tragic car accident, giving new meaning to the word "afterlife."
"Somehow we struck an olive tree instead.
Our car stopped on the cliff's brow. Suddenly safe,
We clung together, shade to pagan shade,
Surprised by sunlight, air, this afterlife."
Some of the poems in the Bestiary section charmed me with their simplicity, like Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses. For instance,
p. 33
"After the death of pets, dolls lay too still
And wooden in the cradle, sister, after
We learned death: not hell, no ghosts or angels,
But a old thin in the image of a warm thing,
Limp as sleep without the twitch of dreams."
I particularly liked a pair of poems evoking Odysseus and Penelope.
p. 37
"He loved to watch her at the loom:
The fluent wrists, the liquid motion
Of small tasks not thought about.
The shuttle leaping in and out,
Dolphins sewing the torn ocean."
p. 42
"Believe what you want to. That they never touched me.
Believe your own stories, as you would have me do,
How you only survived by the wise infidelities.
Believe that each day you wrote me a letter
That never arrived. Kill all the damn suitors
If you think it will make you feel better."
And lines that will make me look at willow trees differently than before.
p. 72
"Willows are messy trees. Hair in their eyes,
They weep like women after too much wine
And not enough love. They litter a lawn with leaves
Like the butts of regrets smoked down to the filter."
I look forward to reading this book many more times.
"Somehow we struck an olive tree instead.
Our car stopped on the cliff's brow. Suddenly safe,
We clung together, shade to pagan shade,
Surprised by sunlight, air, this afterlife."
Some of the poems in the Bestiary section charmed me with their simplicity, like Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses. For instance,
p. 33
"After the death of pets, dolls lay too still
And wooden in the cradle, sister, after
We learned death: not hell, no ghosts or angels,
But a old thin in the image of a warm thing,
Limp as sleep without the twitch of dreams."
I particularly liked a pair of poems evoking Odysseus and Penelope.
p. 37
"He loved to watch her at the loom:
The fluent wrists, the liquid motion
Of small tasks not thought about.
The shuttle leaping in and out,
Dolphins sewing the torn ocean."
p. 42
"Believe what you want to. That they never touched me.
Believe your own stories, as you would have me do,
How you only survived by the wise infidelities.
Believe that each day you wrote me a letter
That never arrived. Kill all the damn suitors
If you think it will make you feel better."
And lines that will make me look at willow trees differently than before.
p. 72
"Willows are messy trees. Hair in their eyes,
They weep like women after too much wine
And not enough love. They litter a lawn with leaves
Like the butts of regrets smoked down to the filter."
I look forward to reading this book many more times.
February 24, 2023
Stallings is the best of both worlds: formal, constrained traditional structures, brimmed with classical allusions (and often topics), but with a thoroughly modern sensibility. When she focuses on the emotions of the women in classical tales, she prefigured a current trend by twenty years. When she writes a lament for a sea turtle, or the child she was, it’s heartbreaking.
Readers of Stallings- even reviewers- wonder why more can’t write like she does, serious, modern, structured, even rhyming, like an immigrant from the 19th century whose learned our tongue like a native. But that’s because it’s hard, too hard, and rhyming is hard, even if it were fashionable. She’s a rare talent, and we’re lucky to have her.
Readers of Stallings- even reviewers- wonder why more can’t write like she does, serious, modern, structured, even rhyming, like an immigrant from the 19th century whose learned our tongue like a native. But that’s because it’s hard, too hard, and rhyming is hard, even if it were fashionable. She’s a rare talent, and we’re lucky to have her.
July 20, 2024
The Tantrum was one of my favorites from this collection:
Struck with grief you were, though only four,
The day your mother cut her mermaid hair
And stood, a stranger, smiling at the door.
They frowned, tsk-tsked your willful, cruel despair,
When you slunk beneath the long piano strings
And sobbed until your lungs hiccupped for air,
Unbribable with curses, cake, playthings.
You mourned a mother now herself no more,
But brave and fashionable. The golden rings
That fringed her naked neck, whom were they for?
Not you, but for the world, now in your place,
A full eclipse. You wept down on the floor;
She wept up in her room. They told you this:
That she could grow it back, and just as long,
They told you, lying always about loss,
For you know she never did. And they were wrong.
Struck with grief you were, though only four,
The day your mother cut her mermaid hair
And stood, a stranger, smiling at the door.
They frowned, tsk-tsked your willful, cruel despair,
When you slunk beneath the long piano strings
And sobbed until your lungs hiccupped for air,
Unbribable with curses, cake, playthings.
You mourned a mother now herself no more,
But brave and fashionable. The golden rings
That fringed her naked neck, whom were they for?
Not you, but for the world, now in your place,
A full eclipse. You wept down on the floor;
She wept up in her room. They told you this:
That she could grow it back, and just as long,
They told you, lying always about loss,
For you know she never did. And they were wrong.
Read
December 15, 2025"After the death of pets, dolls lay too still
And wooden in the cradle, sister, after
We learned death: not hell, no ghosts or angels,
But a old thin in the image of a warm thing,
Limp as sleep without the twitch of dreams."
-------------------
"He loved to watch her at the loom:
The fluent wrists, the liquid motion
Of small tasks not thought about.
The shuttle leaping in and out,
Dolphins sewing the torn ocean."
---------------
"Believe what you want to. That they never touched me.
Believe your own stories, as you would have me do,
How you only survived by the wise infidelities.
Believe that each day you wrote me a letter
That never arrived. Kill all the damn suitors
If you think it will make you feel better."
And wooden in the cradle, sister, after
We learned death: not hell, no ghosts or angels,
But a old thin in the image of a warm thing,
Limp as sleep without the twitch of dreams."
-------------------
"He loved to watch her at the loom:
The fluent wrists, the liquid motion
Of small tasks not thought about.
The shuttle leaping in and out,
Dolphins sewing the torn ocean."
---------------
"Believe what you want to. That they never touched me.
Believe your own stories, as you would have me do,
How you only survived by the wise infidelities.
Believe that each day you wrote me a letter
That never arrived. Kill all the damn suitors
If you think it will make you feel better."
October 17, 2019
I love the playfulness of her poems even in form, and I especially love the poems that dig into mythology and settle into the personas of well-known myths. Myths generally are so omniscient, and here she gives voices to characters of myths, using them to talk about relatable issues. You get the feeling that she's using these personas (or her fixation on the animals for instance) to talk about more personal things in a different way. I really like this.
October 4, 2017
Stalling's work is lucid, exquisitely formal, witty, imaginative, insightful. What's not to love?
I first read the "Archaic Smile" years ago. It has stayed with me.
I first read the "Archaic Smile" years ago. It has stayed with me.
January 28, 2023
Wonderful.
September 8, 2024
A personal favorite of mine for too many reasons. Not a single word ever goes to waste in her poetry. Each letter leaves you shaken.
December 28, 2024
4.5 Stars.
December 15, 2023
'Archaic Smile' was the debut poetry collection by A.E. Stallings, an American who moved to Athens, Greece, a couple of decades ago. Published in 1999, it won that year's Richard Wilbur Award and its opening poem, 'A Postcard from Greece', is perhaps my favourite of all her work. It is a sonnet with slant rhymes describing a car accident:
Hatched from sleep, as we slipped out of orbit
Round a clothespin curve new-watered with the rain,
I saw the sea, the sky, as bright as pain
That outer space through which we were to plummet.
Stallings lives in the modern world of cars and planes and thinks in terms of orbits and outer space; the Greece of this poem is not there yet - there is no guardrail on the cliff-sided road, the only warnings are the memorials to those who have died there, who
sliced the tedious sea once, like a knife.
Luckily, the car hits an olive tree on the edge of the cliff and they don't go over.
We clung together, shade to pagan shade,
Surprised by sunlight, air, this afterlife.
And so the ancient world steps in to save her from rash modernity, and in this first poem she weaves the present and the past together, living as a pagan shade in a refreshed existence. And the rest of the book, and indeed all her work, carries on this integration of past and present.
The first section of the book is titled 'Underworld', appropriate for that near-death event, but mostly being poems such as 'Hades Welcomes his Bride' and 'Persephone Writes a Letter to her Mother' - there is a lot of Greek mythology in Stallings' work, but filtered through a modern sensibility:
Death, the deportation officer,
Has seen your papers and has found them wanting.
In the second section, 'A Bestiary', she writes of her American experiences of animals and birds, in life and death and freedom and captivity, with her customary detached amusement. Take 'Watching the Vulture at the Road Kill':
We stopped the car to watch. Too close.
He bounced his moon-walk bounce and rose
With a shrug up to the kudzu sleeve
Of a pine, to wait for us to leave.
She observes that most other birds have to get in and out in a hurry, whether raptors or prey, and draws a lesson from it:
There is no peace but scavengers.
The third section, 'Tour of the Labyrinth', returns to Greek themes, but again weaving past and present, as in the reaction to an antique pot being broken. The final section is 'For the Losers of Things', echoing the sense of loss or near-loss in the rest of the book, but staying in the present - 'Watching the News After the Tornados' - or even the far future, with another of my personal favourites, 'The Machines Mourn the Passing of People':
The air now is silent of curses or praise.
Jilted, abandoned to hells of what weather,
Left to our own devices forever,
We watch the sun rust at the end of its days.
As can be seen from the excerpts quoted, Stallings is a formalist, and very comfortable with whatever form and metre is appropriate for the particular piece she is producing. 'Archaic Smile' is a superb collection, readable and rereadable, memorable, quotable. Her subsequent collections have been equally impressive. If there is a better poet currently writing in English, I haven't run across them.
Hatched from sleep, as we slipped out of orbit
Round a clothespin curve new-watered with the rain,
I saw the sea, the sky, as bright as pain
That outer space through which we were to plummet.
Stallings lives in the modern world of cars and planes and thinks in terms of orbits and outer space; the Greece of this poem is not there yet - there is no guardrail on the cliff-sided road, the only warnings are the memorials to those who have died there, who
sliced the tedious sea once, like a knife.
Luckily, the car hits an olive tree on the edge of the cliff and they don't go over.
We clung together, shade to pagan shade,
Surprised by sunlight, air, this afterlife.
And so the ancient world steps in to save her from rash modernity, and in this first poem she weaves the present and the past together, living as a pagan shade in a refreshed existence. And the rest of the book, and indeed all her work, carries on this integration of past and present.
The first section of the book is titled 'Underworld', appropriate for that near-death event, but mostly being poems such as 'Hades Welcomes his Bride' and 'Persephone Writes a Letter to her Mother' - there is a lot of Greek mythology in Stallings' work, but filtered through a modern sensibility:
Death, the deportation officer,
Has seen your papers and has found them wanting.
In the second section, 'A Bestiary', she writes of her American experiences of animals and birds, in life and death and freedom and captivity, with her customary detached amusement. Take 'Watching the Vulture at the Road Kill':
We stopped the car to watch. Too close.
He bounced his moon-walk bounce and rose
With a shrug up to the kudzu sleeve
Of a pine, to wait for us to leave.
She observes that most other birds have to get in and out in a hurry, whether raptors or prey, and draws a lesson from it:
There is no peace but scavengers.
The third section, 'Tour of the Labyrinth', returns to Greek themes, but again weaving past and present, as in the reaction to an antique pot being broken. The final section is 'For the Losers of Things', echoing the sense of loss or near-loss in the rest of the book, but staying in the present - 'Watching the News After the Tornados' - or even the far future, with another of my personal favourites, 'The Machines Mourn the Passing of People':
The air now is silent of curses or praise.
Jilted, abandoned to hells of what weather,
Left to our own devices forever,
We watch the sun rust at the end of its days.
As can be seen from the excerpts quoted, Stallings is a formalist, and very comfortable with whatever form and metre is appropriate for the particular piece she is producing. 'Archaic Smile' is a superb collection, readable and rereadable, memorable, quotable. Her subsequent collections have been equally impressive. If there is a better poet currently writing in English, I haven't run across them.
March 2, 2016
Maybe even 4.5*
I have always had a fondness for things Greek, especially the ancient myths and gods. Many of these poems combine people and ideas from these with a modern-day style. Most of the poems deal with death and the afterlife (generally not my favorite topic); of these, I loved "Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother", "Cardinal Numbers", "Elegy for a Loggerhead Turtle Washed up on a South Carolina Beach" & "The Machines Mourn the Passing of People".
I have always had a fondness for things Greek, especially the ancient myths and gods. Many of these poems combine people and ideas from these with a modern-day style. Most of the poems deal with death and the afterlife (generally not my favorite topic); of these, I loved "Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother", "Cardinal Numbers", "Elegy for a Loggerhead Turtle Washed up on a South Carolina Beach" & "The Machines Mourn the Passing of People".
February 22, 2008
The debut collection of A. E. Stallings, the most promising formalist I've encountered thus far. Her sonnets are grandly conceived, finely executed, and pleasurably and profitably reread. She also possesses two of the greatest poetic ornaments, and sense of humor, and a sense of humility.
Read
March 2, 2010I loved this--tried not to gulp it down too fast, and to take the time to savor the lovely words and images. I especially love her take on Greek mythology, but there were poems throughout that won me over.
May 21, 2008
My all time favorite book of modern poetry. Her view of childhood is playful, yet honest and personal- sometimes heartbreaking.
April 20, 2009
These are high quality poems of recent vintage. The poet is worth seeking out.
February 21, 2008
in the archaic light of 2001, I listened and then I read this.
July 4, 2012
She's one of my favorite poets.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews