Ange Mlinko on A.E. Stallings's Work With Metaphor

Ange Mlinko reviews A.E. Stallings's recent work, both in translation and verse, for London Review of Books. "Only she would think to frame the history of [Homer's] Batrachomyomachia in the voice of an anonymous mouse scholiast and offer such a rich history of the close connection between mice and scholarship," writes Mlinko. Further in: 

Like, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is Stallings’s fourth book of poems, after Olives (2012), Hapax (2006) and Archaic Smile (1999). As in those earlier collections, Stallings synthesises lived experience with the imaginative experience of ancient literature, religion and mythology…

[…]

Later, in Like, the speaker transporting the water is transported by the water:

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,
But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:
Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query –

Here the ‘inland sea’ is the Mediterranean, and it is a vessel of people – her migrant self, or Syrian refugees – that lands, or almost lands, precariously on the shelf or shoreline. This is deft work, and we can admire it as we admire a great technician, but Stallings is also making a philosophical point: the reality is that metaphor, true to its etymological origins (‘to bear, carry, transfer’), is still doing that ancient work just as a vessel still carries water to the thirsty, and another vessel carries migrants over the deep. Another vessel, or another craft. Having faith in one’s craft is a way to survive the world.

Read on at LRB.