A leafy crown

 From best American poetry 2024. 

Of "Crown Shyness," Stallings writes: "This is my first sonnet crown, even though the sonnet has been a default mode for me for forever! It isn't that I haven't tried-Ive even tried to write a crown about 'crown shyness' between mature trees before (it's one of those facts that fascinates poets), but it was just about trees, and there was not enough there" there for more than, say, two complete sonnets.

But I've also spent a long time thinking about Homer, and in the last decade particularly about the lliad, and its environmental violence on top of the human destruction. (It's a topical concern: the classicist Edith Hall has a book coming out about the Iliad and environmental catastrophe.) I live in Greece, and I often think about how the Aegean islands are denuded of trees, that the landscape we think of as 'Greek' is already the result of deforestation from ancient times, when mature forests were felled to build navies, followed by overgrazing by goats and sheep. Now, of course, the threat is also wildfire. Another thing that obsesses me about the Iliad and the Odyssey is how, despite being part of the same cycle of stories and with many of the same characters, they are very careful not to overlap at all in terms of narrative. There's an academic term for this, 'Monro's law,' but I have long been thinking about it as a sort of 'crown shyness' of these towering oaks of Western literature. Suddenly I hit upon laying the trees and the epics end to end, and I was finally able to fashion this leafy crown."