Archaic Smile

by A.E. Stallings

A new edition of A. E. Stallings's first book of poems, which was awarded the Richard Wilbur Award.



In Archaic Smile, by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist A. E. Stallings, the poet couples poetic meditations on classic stories and themes with poems about the everyday, sometimes mundane occurrences of contemporary life (like losing an umbrella or fishing with one's father), and she infuses the latter with the magic of myth and history. With the skill of a scholar and translator and the playful, pristine composition of a poet, Stallings bridges the gap between these two distant worlds.

Stallings "invigorates the old forms and makes them sing" (Meryl Natchez, ZYZZYVA) in her poetry, and the scope and origins of her talents are on full display in the acclaimed author's first collection. The poems of Archaic Smile are sung with a timeless, technically impeccable, and utterly true voice.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published December 6, 2022

About the author

Alicia 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).

Reviews

[Patrick Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reissue of Stallings’s first book. Not a bad poem here, and a few exceptionally good ones.

[syd · Rating 4 out of 5]

there were a few poems i did not care for but the poems that made me scream balanced it out to four stars

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Postcard from Greece

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.
No guardrails hemmed the road, no way to stop it,
The only warning, here and there, a shrine:
Some tended still, some antique and forgotten,
Empty of oil, but all were consecrated
To those who lost their wild race with the road
And sliced the tedious sea once, like a knife.
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.



Eurydice’s Footnote

Love, then, always was a matter of revision
As reality, to poet or politician
Is but the first rough draft of history or legend.
So your artist’s eye, a sharp and perfect prism,
Refracts discreet components of a beauty
To fix them in some still more perfect order.
(I say this on the other side of order
Where things can be re-invented no longer.)
….



The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles

Believe what you want to. Believe that I wove,
If you wish, twenty years, and waited, while you
Were knee-deep in blood, hip-deep in goddesses.

I’ve not much to show for twenty years’ weaving—
I have but one half-finished cloth at the loom.
Perhaps it’s the lengthy, meticulous grieving.

Explain how you want to. Believe I unraveled
At night what I stitched in the slow siesta,
How I kept them all waiting for me to finish,

The suitors, you call them. Believe what you want to.
Believe that they waited for me to finish,
Believe I beguiled them with nightly un-doings.

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.

[John Reis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the author’s debut collection published in 1999. I did not like this as much as her more recent work. The meter and the occasional rhyming are both there.

The rhyming is subtle and never sing song. It's a surprises you. The poems themselves did not move me.

I did like “The Man who Wouldn't Plant Willow Trees” and especially, “Fishing.”

[Avryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

A.E. Stallings has a gift. To borrow some words from T.S. Eliot, Stallings' poetry draws "not only on the pastness of the past, but its presence."

[Jeremy Manuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy A.E. Stallings mix of everyday life, Greek mythology and ruminations on aspects of life that she instills into her poetry. While I am by no means an expert in poetry I do enjoy the poetry that she puts out. I like the style and the substance the she presents.

As with all collections of poetry there are those that I liked better than others, but I found this collection to be a good one. I didn't like Hapax quite as much, but I felt like Archaic Smile was more similar to Like, which was the first book of poetry I read of hers, although I do think that Like was maybe a bit better overall.

[Michael Lin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciate the poems in this book because they use formalism and structure, unlike many modern poems, which makes them more accessible for neophytes. And yet, within their structures, the poems are still able to access the universal, and present a smiling gem to you, the reader. A gift.

[- · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Statistics, he scoffs, are for those without destinies.”

[andré crombie · Rating 3 out of 5]

notes: i loved her more recent collection, like, but i liked (ha ha) these less. a bit stilted.