" Frieze Frame is a lucidly brilliant, learned read that wears its learning lightly, inviting the reader into a coterie of artists and intellectuals, traced and uncovered with a poet''s touch." --Times Literary Supplement "[A] compact, original book. Whether they are shown in London or Athens, the Marbles will always be one of history''s singular Rorschach tests. Keats saw beauty; Byron saw tragedy; in Frieze Frame , readers may see some version of themselves." --Wall Street Journal "Highly entertaining . The anecdotal style of Frieze Frame works wonderfully for a story driven by a few characters and their mad antics. It shows us that the debate around the Marbles has always been a strange projection of our own desires - from poets finding their own principles modelled in the friezes, to modern politicians using the controversy to score points. But no one tops Lord Elgin, whose desires were straight-forwardly decorative.
Like a figure in Greek myth, he plundered the temple of Athena and sorely paid the price." --The Spectator "[A]s Stallings notes with only slight exaggeration, ''the Marbles touch on nearly every topic of the long nineteenth century,'' a claim that Frieze Frame unpacks in a highly entertaining manner, tracking the responses to the Marbles through Regency and Victorian England, a newly independent Greece, and into the 20th century. The result is a brilliant riot of characters, personalities, and voices that jostle together across continents and centuries . Stallings is first and foremost a consummate poet, and she is at her best when delivering honed readings of poems that have responded to the Marbles over time, in both English and Greek." -- The Nation "I relished every page. Stallings packs so much into her account--so many interesting people, such a wealth of incident--yet does so with ease. Her book is at once compact and compendious ." -- John Wilson in First Things "Stallings captures both the intense excitement the marbles caused in artistic and literary circles in England and also the sense of loss the site of the Parthenon represented for Greek writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In placing imaginative responses to the marbles above arguments based on property rights, Stallings makes a powerful case for giving these masterpieces from 5th-century Athens a much-needed new lease of cultural life." --Apollo magazine PRAISE FOR A. E. STALLINGS'' OTHER BOOKS: "A.E. Stallings is that rare poet who can write in a traditional form (sonnets! sestinas!) without letting the form squeeze the life out of the poem. This Afterlife which selects from more than two decades of work, solidifies her virtuoso status. Much of the pleasure comes from her precise, imaginative eye.
" Washington Post on This Afterlife "Stallings''s work imagines the poet as an artisan, and her poems satisfy in the way a handblown glass bowl satisfies; they have heft and shape; they rest solidly in the palm." New York Times Book Review on This Afterlife "[Stallings''] couplets . have a lively, nimble music that should captivate modern ears." -- Wall Street Journal on The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice "Stallings'' translation of this ancient epic is a delight: charming, witty, and vividly alive, with buoyant rhymes and eye-catching illustrations." --Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe on The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice "[ Like ] presents a diverse quiver of poems--arranged in alphabetical order--polished and sharpened by her typically innovative use of traditional verse forms, poised vocabulary, and a playful dexterous teasing-out of simile and metaphor." -- Los Angeles Review of Books on Like.