A.E. Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. This Afterlife: Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in December 2022.
I speak to the unbeautiful of this bird. James Merrill
The peacock thinks he can’t be seen:Stealthily towards the cat-food bowlHe stalks, while I’m behind the screenCoffee in hand: peacock patrol.More blue than the Saronic, green
As bristles...
Sisters, infernal virgins, would you kill again,Knowing the endless sieves you would refill again?
Night is where the day’s mistakes repeat,I swallow the bitter crumb, the sleeping pill again.
Isn’t the womb the sieve, the moon the springFrom which blood’s phases rise, and fill, and spill again?
I carried thrice, bore twice, and once I grievedAnd shouldered my vessel up the...
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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