This Afterlife

- Blurb -

The Poetry Book Society Winter Special Commendation 2022. ' 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.