Like
Poems
by A.E. Stallings
Farrar
Straus Giroux
175
Varick Street, New York 10014
New
York
ISBN:
9780374187323
137
Pages
$24.00
Review
by Dennis Daly
Alexander
Pope famously defined “true wit” as “what oft was thought, but n’er so well
expressed.” More than any other contemporary poet, A.E. Stallings, an American
expatriate living in Athens, Greece, exemplifies this pedigree of versifier.
Her poems make that which seems quite ordinary or just everyday sing.
Stallings’
new book, Like, doubles down on what she has done before in her three earlier
volumes of original poetry— identifying and, on occasion, inviting irony,
tragedy, and most of all, a deeper understanding of human nature into her
formalist domicile. Her narrative conclusions can be biting.
The
meditations of Stallings often include domestic objects such as a pair of
scissors, a cast iron skillet, a pencil, a pull toy, and colored Easter eggs. Her
descriptions for each of these sedentary items or groupings create both a great
depth and an array of un-tranquil perceptions. For instance Stallings describes
the common careening of a pull toy this way,
It
didn’t mind being dragged
When
it toppled on its side
Scraping
its coat of primary colors:
Love
has no pride.
Or consider Stallings’s piece Dyeing the
Easter Eggs, the pun firmly placed on “Dyeing,”
…
Resurrection’s in the air
Like
the whiff of vinegar. These eggs won’t hatch,
My
daughter says, since they are cooked and dead.”
A
hard-boiled batch.
I
am the children’s blonde American mother,
Who
thinks that Easter eggs should be pastel—
But
they have icon eyes, and they are Greek.
And
eggs should be, they’ve learned at school this week,
Blood
red.
Other
sorties into nature, the classics, and even current news headlines by Stallings
amass a hoard of well-expressed insights. With her poem Little Owl, the poet engenders a
world of predation observing human organisms stroll through their habitual landscapes
or seascapes along life’s way. Danger also exhibits its warnings in equal
measure. Stallings, speaking of her subject owl, says,
A
drab still vessel attuned to whatever stirred,
Near
or far:
Hedgehog
shuffling among windfall of figs,
Gecko,
mouse.
Then
she swiveled the orbit of her gaze upon us
Like
the Cyclops eye-beam of a lighthouse.
Pure
irony flows, line by line, out of Stallings piece entitled Parmenion. The title
is taken from the name of an air raid test. Originally, however, Parmenion was
the second in command of Alexander-the-Great’s army. He was wrongly accused of
treason by his own son and executed. Stallings connects the false alarms, which
in turn excite and puzzle the populace, to this historical breach of justice.
The poem begins as if describing a god’s pontifications and builds into very
earthly anxieties,
The
air-raid siren howls
Over
the quiet, the un-rioting city.
It’s
just a drill.
But
the unearthly vowels
Ululate
the air, a thrill
While
for a moment everybody stops
What
they were about to do
On
the broken street, or in the struggling shops,
Or
looks up for an answer
Into
the contrailed palimpsest of blue.
Centered
by serendipity (The poet arranges her titles in alphabetical order), the
collection’s masterpiece, Lost and Found, sprawls over eighteen pages and
thirty-six stanzas. The poem is wonderful. A mother, frantically and
unsuccessfully looking for a child’s plastic toy, continues her search into a metaphoric
dreamtime. Arriving in the Valley of the Moon, she peruses continuous landfills
of mindlessness and lost opportunity. Along the way this protagonist-seeker and
Stallings’ persona is guided by the mother of all muses. Here the poem becomes
a parable on creativeness and artistic choices. Some stanzas have a very
specific point to make, like this one,
Not
water, though, I knew as I drew near it—
It
was a liquid, true, but more like gin
Though
smelling of aniseed—some cold, clear spirit
Water
turns cloudy. “Many are taken in,
Some
poets seek it, thinking that they fear it,
The
reflectionless fountain of Oblivion.
By
sex, by pills, by leap of doubt, by gas,
Or
at the bottom of a tilting glass.
Empathy,
the most emotionally efficacious poem in Stallings’ collection, rewrites the
plight of today’s northern African emigre into a more familiar interior venue. Stallings’
family-centric verse is as personal as it gets. The poet concocts a thought
experiment with her own lineage. She posits them precariously adrift and then gives
cosmic thanks that this scenario is not so. She explains,
I’m
glad we didn’t wake
Our
kids in the thin hours, to take
Not
a thing, not a favorite toy,
And
didn’t hand over our cash
To
one of the smuggling rackets,
That
we didn’t buy cheap life jackets
No
better than bright orange trash
And
less buoyant.
Amazing
as a poetic tour de force, perfect as the title poem, and outrageously funny as
an angry rant, Stallings’ Like the Sestina moves determinedly to its droll
facebook-like conclusion. The ride alone is worth it. The poet ends each line
in “like.” She enumerates every cliché type (or most) that uses “like” as a
space filler. And finally she initiates a versified crescendo,
…Like
is like
Invasive
zebra mussels, or it’s like
Those
nutria things, or kudzu, or belike
Redundant
fast-food franchises, each like
(More
like) the next. Those poets who dislike
Inversions,
archaisms, who just like
Plain
English as she’s spoke—why isn’t “like”
Their
(literally) every other word? I’d like
Us
just to admit that’s what real speech is like.
But
as you like, my friend…
For
those readers who, incongruously, still believe that the medium is the message,
or at least a good part of it, don’t miss this Stallings’ collection. Like may
be her best book yet, her opus supreme. For those others, who aren’t formalist
aficionados—read it anyway; you’ll more than like it, you’ll love it.
