A.E. Stallings is a poet from Georgia who lives in Greece and writes the most gorgeous poetry in relatively strict form. In Olives, she treats the structure of fairy tales, myth and that odd comfort of nostalgia and loss with clarity and compassion. Her humor is made of knots and bone-deep discomforts, and she has impeccable timing. Here there are rocking lines and sharp phrases filling the trees with fruit and life.
The craft of this collection is astounding and easy to miss because she isn't drawing attention to it needlessly. Where it matters, she does. Fairy tales tend to be the province of women to draw out, turn upside down and make less sugary. Stallings does not shy away from that history, nor does she capitulate to it, a neat bit of work in measured lines and high stakes metaphor.
Read with water and bread on a day that has less room to breathe than at first you thought.
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| There's a poem on the back, too |
This was a reading group pick in 2014. I stared at the cover a bit, chatted with my poet friend who is in the group and bought it. Anyone who went through the Greek Myths phase recognizes the pull and lure of vase paintings. My own The Odyssey phase (unending) adds to that gravity. It was a welcome addition to the holiday season: a retail worker's roller coaster of high and low energy, sore feet, giddy laughter and constant presence.
The book was in my holiday reading pile this past New Year's, and while it was as good and deep and troubling and familiar as ever, something else happened last year that changed this for good. I got the Hamilton: An American Musical original cast recording and listened to it like it didn't break me into tiny pieces.
These two things should not be related.
Outside of having been written by MacArthur Foundation Geniuses who excel in form and the unexpected, I mean.
It was an absolute shock to read the first poem in the collection and hear Lin-Manuel Miranda's voice unbidden, reading it to me. It is important that you know that this was not the plan. I didn't connect the two before. I cannot unconnect them now. If ever the original cast of Hamilton is asked to read these (or any other) poems for recording for a reason that they are good with, it will introduce worlds to worlds already knitted only unseen.
In my head, Anthony Ramos and Phillipa Soo read this:
Fairy-tale Logic
Related Poem Content Details
Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—
You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.
Sorry, not sorry
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