"This afterlife" by A.E. Stallings (Carcanet, 2022)

Selected poems, from "Poetry", etc. Several have been in "Best American Poetry". Many forms are used, though few involve letter-manipulation (i.e, acrostics, anagrams, etc - "OLIVES" being an exception). If you like tidy pieces with a sting at the end, if you admire technical mastery and aren't fooled by the easy reading into thinking there aren't allusions and hidden depths, you'll love this. UK readers might see similarities to the early Wendy Cope in poems like "Arrowhead Hunting" which begins with "The land is full of what is lost" and ends with

O hapless hunter, though your aim was true - The spooked hart, wounded, fleeting in its fear - And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.

There are lines to like (for a variety of reasons) in many of the poems. Here are just a few -

• "The dead ... pester you like children for the wrong details" (p.6)
• "reality, to poets or to politician/ Is but the first rough draft of history or legend./ So your artist's eye, a sharp and perfect prism,/ Refracts discrete components of a beauty/ To fix them in some still more perfect order." (p.9)
• "Who find their way by calling into darkness/ To hear their voices bounce off the shape of things " (p.55)
• "The sun's great warship sinks and burns" (p.79)
• "Tulips ... do not wilt so much as faint ... they twist/ As if to catch the last applause" (p.99)
• "As though a host of diacritical marks/ Swooped over the rough breathing of the sea,/ The swallows parse the brightness in dark arcs,/ Glossing the infinitive to be" (p.193)

When a poem fails for me it's not because I'm baffled, but because the poem doesn't do enough. "Jigsaw Puzzle" for example is a surprise selection. It has 5 short-lined abab stanzas, the first line being "First the four corners" - no great surprise. The ending is "Slowly you restore/ The fractured world and start/ To recreate an afternoon before/ It fell apart/" leading to the unsurprising final line "Where one piece is missing". The middle section from "Hapax" seems rather flat. The 18-page "Lost and Found" did little for me.

I most liked "The Man who Wouldn't Plant willow Trees", "Aftershocks" and "Like, the Sestina".

Other reviews

• Ethan McGuire (Stallings’ most common narratives have to do with the Greek Underworld, archaeology, heroines, and monsters, as well as such non-Greek literary figures as Alice in Wonderland and universal themes like motherhood, feeling foreign, and mortality. ... The Hapax section feels more personal, even occasionally bordering on the confessional ... In Hapax, Stallings’ verse craft has improved, but the Archaic Smile section contains better lines. ... Olives gives us our first real glimpse of Mother Stallings too, in such exceptional poems as “Pop Music,” “Hide and Seek,” “Sea Girls,” “The Mother’s Loathing of Balloons,” and my favorite of all her poems, the masterful “Listening to Peter and the Wolf with Jason, Aged Three,” ... As Stallings ages, her poems become ever more obsessed with time itself, as evident in poems like “After a Greek Proverb” (one of her best villanelles) ... Like is less self-serious than the previous sections but also occasionally too clever for its own good, as in the overworked “Like, the Sestina.” The section is overindulgent as well, a tendency that reaches its peak in the eighteen-page, thirty-six-part “Lost and Found.”)
• Erica Reid (In "Alice in the Looking Glass,” ... Stallings is actually using a full set of (what else to call it?) conceptual rhymes. In this case, “left” rhymes with “right,”)
• Jennifer Schuldt
• Tobias Wray