Visits from the Seventh

Visits from the Seventh is a highly original debut. Arvio's wry, uncanny poems take the form of conversations between a woman and a throng of invisible presences--visitors, as she calls them--who counsel, challenge, cajole and comfort her. Together they murmur about destiny, the moon, a walk on Park Avenue, sex, ambition, dreams.

"Poets," writes Richard Howard, "find remarkable ways to talk to themselves, to divide and triumph, to split the speech-atom--'the journal of my other self,' Rilke called it. For women poets, (Christina Rossetti, say, or Virginia Woolf) voices from 'outside' are minatory; for men they are merely the Muse. Arvio has listened hard and heedfully to these hauntings of hers, certainly the most 'convincing' visitations since Merrill's Ouija-board transcriptions, and has arranged her overhearing in the readiest manner for her own listeners: the careful, shapely stanzas; the clear conundrum of spirit possession, which is Arvio's poetic incarnation. The whole series is an articulation of what we used to call 'the inner life': one woman's passionate questioning of her sources, and their equally passionate (if often derisive) answers. She has forged her own dialogue of the dead, somehow managing to be funny and erotic at once, pursued and in possession. I love hearing her persuasive voices; they are the woman herself."Sarah Arvio was born in 1954 and grew up near New York City. Educated at schools abroad and at Columbia University, she now works as a translator for the United Nations is New York and Switzerland. The first eleven poems of Visits from the Seventh won The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize, and were reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1998. Other poems from the sequence won Poetry's Frederick Bock Prize.

In 2003, she was awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Floating

I said some nonsense or other to them
and they mocked back, "but we're your one design,"
or "you're our one design"--which was it?

The pen slipped and capered on the page,
escorted by ripplings in the atmosphere
like breeze with nothing to blow against.

"We wear no form or figure of our own
--a wisp, a thread, a twig, a shred of smoke--
to tell us from the motions of the air.

We'd love to live in even a bubble,
to wrap around its glossy diaphanous,
reaching and rounding, as slinkily real

as a morning stretch or a dance in a field.
But we know only this air, and memory,
once, or several times, removed and turned,

the pang of a once-had, a maybe-again,
that shifting half-light, our home and habitat,
those hours, soft-toned, windless, that favor passage,

the usual relay of twilights. And,
how often a century? The sun eclipsed,
that 'created' half-light, not dusk or dawn:

us glowing through, our light, our element,
in which we show best, glow best, what we are.
Yesterday some snowflakes slipped through us,

refreshing kisses passing through our heat.
Ah, we wanted to say. If we could have,
we'd have laughed right out from sheer surprise."

And what else? "We've got you to stand for us."
And I have you, I said, to float for me.

Côte d'Azur

Out of the blue, one of them lipped to me:
"A handful of days can hold a whole life,
sunlight dazzling on a blue foaming sea,

the touch of a body and nothing more,
one whisper which was the very whisper
for which you had waited hour after hour,

maybe not the same words, not the same voice,
all those words other and voice still other,
the ring of unknown words, those were the ones."

The hand that held my pen began to shine:
"How sad are those who borrow their solace
from several days never to return,

some incident of passion or promise,
some glimpse..." "Oh yes, but sadder still are those
who never bask on even that brief beach."

How blue the sea looked; it shone and they shone;
now they glittered with an utter glitter,
now they beamed, for this was their greatest yes.

"The special few are those who live full joys,
not a day, a week or a mooncycle
but an extension of years, or a life."

"Chimera on the surface of the sea,
haze that lies heavy on a salty sea,
haze hovering over a summer sea,

despite the scintillations of the sun."
"Where will all this lead? It will lead nowhere.
Nowhere at all is where we want to go.

A blue nowhere made up of blue nothing,
a moment of bliss lasting a moment,
long enough for life, that long and no more."

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