The poems in A.E. Stallings’ latest collection lodge themselves in one’s memory, and the reader does not simply imagine their subject—she shares in the experience of them, as a bystander who observes a public quarrel in a restaurant, a lunar halo, or the kind gestures of one stranger to another, could be said to participate in those events. The chosen material of Stallings’ poetry calls the languid mind to attention, not by referring it to objects, but by embodying objects. Before our very eyes, the pieces of jigsaw puzzles are assembled only to reveal the missing piece, reminder that all things are ever advancing towards their completion. By the agency of music wolves enter living rooms, where glasses brimful with water hazard their way from wall to wall. In Silence reaches our ears in the toneless voice of a pedant, who hypothesizes on the bayou origins of this now extinct bird, where it “decades ago was first not seen, not heard.”
The poetics of negation and antithesis prevail in this collection and to good effect. In her poem “Deus Ex Machina,” Stallings meditates on the tautology of the eponymous narrative device, repeating the word “because” in almost every line, so that the poetic language remains attached to its subject. This couplet ends the poem, which is comprised of a single, grammatically incomplete sentence:
Because we were actors, because we knew for a fact
We were only actors, because we could not act.
The assertion that actors are actors “because they cannot act” is more than mere wordplay: it defines the art of acting as the art of embodying, of truly being, that which is materially depicted—an understanding of aesthetic production that just as aptly applies to Stallings own work.
In the title poem that introduces this collection, Stallings claims her “fruits”: they are the “small bitter drupes / Full of the golden past and cured in brine.” Likewise, in “Two Violins,” she chooses not the violin “of flame,” but the yellow one, “Light as an exile’s suitcase, / A belly of emptiness”; when that violin is played, “teachers turned in their practiced hands / To see whence the sad notes came.” Like all the best art, these poems cast a wide net to the sea of life, gathering in all its riches. Capable of bringing so much good to our lives, those riches are defined as much by the good that lies outside their reach. Thus, in “The Cenotaph,” we hear the nonplussed voice of one who searches unsuccessfully through the First Cemetery of Athens for the graves of famous men, only to recognize her own mortality, framed “between two dates, and earth and sky.” Overtly alluding to Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” where the speaker found glory in the forgotten dead, this poem finds glory in the living world of the present, in which the forgotten and the famous are enclosed by the same earth and sky, by the same span of present time, parenthesized in eternity.
The beauties of this little book have lit up some little corners in my heart, so that if I never picked it up again, it would nonetheless remain a part of my life. ~ Travis Biddick
