THIS AFTERLIFE - An Evening of Poetry with AE Stallings

Mon Feb 06 2023 at 06:30 pm to 08:00 pm

Blackwell's Bookshop | Manchester

Blackwell's Bookshop Manchester
Publisher/HostBlackwell's Bookshop Manchester
THIS AFTERLIFE - An Evening of Poetry with AE Stallings
Advertisement
Join us for the launch of A.E. Stallings' new collection of Selected Poems - THIS AFTERLIFE
About this Event

We're thrilled to be welcoming to A.E. Stallings to the shop for a special event celebrating the release of her new collection of selected poems - THIS AFTERLIFE, which was the 2022 Poetry Book Society Winter Special Commendation.

About the book:

'The ancients taught me how to sound modern,' A.E. 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 metres, 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.

Raised in Atlanta, 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 was among volunteers helping refugees as they arrived 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.

About the author:

A.E. Stallings is a U.S.-born poet and translator who lives in Greece. She studied Classics at the University of Georgia (in Athens, Georgia) and Oxford University, and lives now in Athens. She has published four volumes of poetry (Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like), and three volumes of verse translation, including Lucretius' The Nature of Things and Hesiod's Works and Days with Penguin Classics. She has been awarded numerous prizes for her translation and poetry, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur fellowship. Her poetry book, Like (FSG), was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.

Doors: 6.30, starts: 6.45

Tickets are £3.00 or free when pre-ordering a copy of the book. THIS AFTERLIFE will also be available to purchase on the night and A.E. Stallings will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or [email protected] and we can arrange this for you.

Advertisement

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Blackwell's Bookshop, 146 Oxford Road, Manchester, United Kingdom

Tickets

GBP 3.00 to GBP 15.99

Discover more events by tags:

Art in ManchesterLiterary-art in Manchester

Sharing is Caring: