A. E. Stallings

A. (Alicia) E. Stallings was born in 1968.  She grew up in Decatur, GA, and was educated at the University of Georgia and Oxford University in classics.  Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry (1994 & 2000) and has received numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize (Pushcart Prize Anthology XXII), the 1997 Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry and the third annual James Dickey Prize from Five Points.  She also serves as an editor for the Atlanta Review.  A finalist for both the Yale Younger Series & Walt Whitman Award, her first poetry collection, Archaic Smile, was awarded the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award by Dana Gioia, and is published by the University of Evansville Press.  She is currently at work on a verse translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura.  She resides in Athens, Greece with her husband, John Psaropoulos, editor of the Athens News.   To visit the A. E. Stallings home page, where you can order Archaic Smile and further explore the work of one of our finest contemporary poets, please click here.



Asphodel

(after the words of Penny Turner, Nymphaion, Greece)

Our guide turned in her saddle, broke the spell:
"You ride now through a field of asphodel,
The flower that grows on the plains of hell.

Across just such a field the pale shade came
Of proud Achilles, who had preferred a name
And short life to a long life without fame,

And summoned by Odysseus he gave
This wisdom, 'Better by far to be a slave
Among the living, than great among the grave.'

I used to wonder, how did such a bloom
Become associated with the tomb?
Then one evening, walking through the gloom,

I noticed a strange fragrance. It was sweet,
Like honey — but with hints of rotting meat.
An army of them bristled at my feet."

The Beloit Poetry Journal Volume 50, Number 1, Fall 1999
Reprinted by permission of the author.



Daphne