A Review of A.E. Stallings, Like
book review
A Review of A.E. Stallings, Like
New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018
ISBN 978-0-374-18732-3, 160 pp., USA $24.00, hardcover
«««
In her delightful essay for Poetry magazine, “Presto Manifesto!,” A.E. Stallings mounts a polemical defense of rhyme. “Rhyme is at the wheel. No, rhyme is the engine,” it declares with contrarian bravura. But Stallings is only getting started. Very quickly, she arrives at a conclusion which all lay readers of poetry intuitively know, but which is tragically one of the greatest heresies in poetry workshops and university presses across the land: that “There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are not predictable unless lines are.” Without the latter principle, readers would feel shallow to enjoy a rhyme of even so great a poet as the Bard himself:
-
For as the sun is daily new and old
So is my love still telling what is told
. . . . . . .
[ subscribers: login for full text ]
- Login or register to post comments
- Email this page
- Printer-friendly version