[Roger Slater]

There's a short review of Alicia's new book in the Sunday Book Section of the NY Times this weekend. By and large quite positive. It says she generally "sticks the dismount." Just being reviewed in the Sunday Book Section is a coup, but to have one's dismounts praised is extra sweet.

[Robin-Kemp]

What fine news!

Here's the full review. For the record, I disagree with the reviewer's needle-in-a-haystack assessment of her "wobbliness." In fact, I don't think he's found a needle. Alicia's level of diction is characteristically high and so I think it's unfair to say that she bent the idiom to fit the endrhyme. Moreover, her diction is relatively elevated, yes, but remains conversational and never displays the tortured syntax of late-Victorian B-list poets.


HAPAX: Poems. By A. E. Stallings. (Triquarterly, cloth, $39.95; paper, $14.95.) Strict fidelity to traditional forms is brave — not only because these forms are unfashionable but because they're unforgiving. Readers know what rhymed pentameter sounds like, and what language sounds like, and when one has been sacrificed for the sake of the other. Stallings deserves high marks not only for the performances in "Hapax" but for their degree of difficulty. She may wobble from time to time, but she always stays on the beam and usually sticks her dismounts. "The Village in the Lake" gets off to an unpromising start, with noisy end-rhymes flagging the very compromises they've forced. If "those who swish / On water skis" is stilted, "grown-ups taught / In scuba diving" is downright unidiomatic. But then Stallings dives deeper, visiting a submerged cemetery and adopting its occupants' point of view: "While in the treetops fishes scud, / And through the murky heavens floats / The shadow of the pleasure boats." "Hapax," according to the book's epigraph, is a Greek word meaning "once, once only, once for all." What's most appealing in Stallings's poems, then, is a sense of hapaxity — an imaginative empathy with those whose lone moment is long gone, like the child actress in "Noir": "Perhaps she's still alive / Watching this somewhere at eighty-five, / The only one who knows, though we might guess, / What the kidnapper whispers in her ear, / Or the color of her dress."

E.M. -- Eric McHenry's book of poems, "Potscrubber Lullabies," will be published later this year.



[This message has been edited by Robin-Kemp (edited April 22, 2006).]

[Susan McLean]

Thanks, Robin, for posting the whole review--though I could wish that the NY Times would find a reviewer who didn't treat the whole project of writing in form as some inexplicable and quaint anomaly. Anyone who starts from that premise cannot do justice to what Alicia actually accomplishes in Hapax. I had to Google to find out what it meant to "stick a dismount." At first it sounded like a negative thing to me. But the gymnastic metaphor is just one more sign, I'd say, that the reviewer views writing in form as some kind of sideshow rather than art. Sigh.

Susan

[Catherine Chandler]

Congratulations to Alicia for having her book reviewed in such a prestigious venue. However, formal poetry unfashionable? With whom? Maybe the NY Times is behind the times and hasn't put its ear to the ground.

[epigone]

Kudos to Alicia (again)!

I agree with Susan. It is clear that, in order to garner so favorable a review, Alicia not only had to stick the dismount, she also had to leap over the innumerable hurdles consisting of the reviewer's prejudice against and ignorance of formal poetry. This is not the first time I have seen discussions of Alicia's poetry that refer to it as "strictly formal" or some similar locution. Only someone who has no ear for meter and is blind to Alicia's wonderfully quirky use of rhyme could describe her poetry as "rhymed pentameter."

epigone

[Rose Kelleher]

Readers know what rhymed pentameter sounds like

But not, apparently, reviewers.

Still, a grudgingly positive review is an even bigger triumph than a friendly one. And in the NY Times - that's huge! Congrulations!

[Richard Wakefield]

Yes, getting reviewed even more or less positively in that venue is a coup -- and yes, the book deserves even better. Her verse does exactly what formal verse should do; it revitalizes language. There are half a dozen poems here that are dazzling and another couple of dozen that are no less splendid but that reveal their riches more slowly. One warning to other poets: You'll probably suffer at least momentary despair about your own writing.
RPW

[Kate Benedict]

What a tiresome approach by the reviewer. Then again, it is possible that some editor whittled the piece down so much that it skewed the emphasis. Happily, the main thing that will stick in reader's minds is that Hapax was singled out for review in the NYTBR. That's an achievement, Alicia, fabulous, fitting and just.

[Robin-Kemp]

McHenry's done quite a lot of reviews in some pretty heavy-hitting venues; his tone seems to be that of William Logan the Younger:

http://www.slate.com/id/2106536/


http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/.../int2002-05-30


But I don't think he's casting aspersions on formal poetry as such, merely by stating that it is "unpopular" (among most contemporary poets, I'd qualify, even if said qualification were only a surface treatment of a complex debate beyond the scope of his capsule review):

http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/...6-mchenry.html


http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/2708.html


<A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/books/review/09MCHENRY.html?ex=1263186000&en=65871a3e3d044235&e i=5088&partner=rssnyt" TARGET=_blank>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/books/review/
09MCHENRY.html?ex=1263186000&en=65871a3e3d044235&e i=5088&partner=rssnyt</A>


You'll find his work in The New Criterion, among other places.

Robin



[This message has been edited by Robin-Kemp (edited April 24, 2006).]

[Margaret Moore]

Haven't caught up with the reviews, but have very recently caught up with HAPAX and this seemed as good a thread as any to say how much I admired the subtlety, economy and lyric grace of the poems therein.

Was struck by the echoes of Louis MacNeice in 'Nettles' - Sunlight on the garden(st 3) and Autobiography
(st 4). Were you conscious of these when composing/revising, Alicia?

Here's to the next collection!

Margaret