This Afterlife
Selected Poems
"The ancients taught me how to sound modern", Alicia Elsbeth Stallings said in an interview. "They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument". For her, "technique" is rooted in traditions of strict forms and meters, an interest that sets her apart as modern – and American – in challenging ways, for being on the face of it old-fashioned, yet ambitiously experimental among the forms she uses.
Born and raised in Georgia, she lives in Athens, Greece. Her poems come out of life's dailiness – as a wife, mother, teacher, an expatriate between languages, a brilliant translator of ancient and modern Greek. She also translates Latin, her most notable large work being the Penguin Lucretius, translated into fourteeners.
Being a poet in Greece entails, for her, being part of that world. She volunteered to help refugees arriving in Greece and their experience haunted her to write, "My love, I'm grateful tonight/ Our listing bed isn't a raft/ Precariously adrift/ As we dodge the coast guard light..." The sharp quatrain commends the observation to memory. The poems, without self-indulgence or confession, are intimate as they address "My love", children or friends.
Born and raised in Georgia, she lives in Athens, Greece. Her poems come out of life's dailiness – as a wife, mother, teacher, an expatriate between languages, a brilliant translator of ancient and modern Greek. She also translates Latin, her most notable large work being the Penguin Lucretius, translated into fourteeners.
Being a poet in Greece entails, for her, being part of that world. She volunteered to help refugees arriving in Greece and their experience haunted her to write, "My love, I'm grateful tonight/ Our listing bed isn't a raft/ Precariously adrift/ As we dodge the coast guard light..." The sharp quatrain commends the observation to memory. The poems, without self-indulgence or confession, are intimate as they address "My love", children or friends.
About the author
A. E. Stallings is a U.S.-born poet and translator who lives in Greece. She studied Classics at the University of Georgia (in Athens, Georgia) and Oxford University, and lives now in Athens. She has published four volumes of poetry (Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like), and three volumes of verse translation, including Lucretius' "The Nature of Things" and Hesiod's "Works and Days" with Penguin Classics. She has been awarded numerous prizes for her translation and poetry, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur fellowship. Her poetry book, Like (FSG), was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.