A.E. Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. This Afterlife: Selected Poems was published in 2022.
Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund Hall
For E.M.
Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?
Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted stones deckled
and foxed with lichen-rings of shaggy galaxies.In flocks you beckon
me to read shallow-graven names on time-thumbed tomes.Soon you’ll sallow, snow-
drop: now so new, yetyour hair’s...
The old road from Athens to Elefsina – the modern name for Eleusis – is still called the Sacred Way, though there is also a modern highway that does the trick. In ancient times, the initiated, or those wanting to become initiated, would travel the ten-odd miles from Athens to experience the ‘Eleusinian Mysteries’.
There’s a term in Greek for a spell of fine weather in the middle of winter, the halcyon days (alkyonides meres), after the kingfisher, which, according to legend, must nest and raise its brood floating on calm waters. These days tend to occur for a week or two from mid-January, but can start any time from the solstice through to 15 February. Perhaps for that reason, the exceptionally mild weather over the twelve days of Christmas did not call forth the same climate anxiety as, for instance, the heat waves of the summer, and the ever worsening and elongating fire season. It’s just the halcyon days, we tell ourselves, and marvel at the blue skies and soft spring-like air.
Hooded Crow: Corvus cornix
On windy days the crows cavortDown slides of air for autumn sport.They dive and spiral, twirl and spin,Then levitate to ride again.
That wind that makes their airy slideComes tumbling down the mountainside,Tousles the heads of trees and dropsTo the sea beyond the cypress tops,
And drinking at the sea’s blue lipsMakes paper sailboats out of...
I bought an antique sieve of hammered tinFor its decorative holes
Patterned like a flower, or a star explodingAt one of the poles.
I think of all it has sifted: flour and sugar,Dust and light,
What must be ground so fine, so fine! to pass through –Milled, contrite.
Light and time it has sifted, like a metal welkinOf punctual stars,
The cold hieroglyphs of the constellations,The raised scars
On...
Much of A.E. Stallings’s work can seem like light verse that suddenly appals: solid, foundational stanzas that chat directly with you, distracting you from the fact that you’re perched with her, Humpty...
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