{"product_id":"visits-from-the-seventh-isbn-9780375709784","title":"Visits from the Seventh","description":"\u003cb\u003eVisits from the Seventh\u003c\/b\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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 \u003cb\u003eVisits from the Seventh\u003c\/b\u003e won \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e's Bernard F. Conners Prize, and were reprinted in \u003cb\u003eThe Best American Poetry 1998\u003c\/b\u003e. Other poems from the sequence won \u003ci\u003ePoetry\u003c\/i\u003e's Frederick Bock Prize.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 2003, she was awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.\u003ci\u003eFloating\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI said some nonsense or other to them\u003cbr\u003eand they mocked back, \"but we're your one design,\"\u003cbr\u003eor \"you're our one design\"--which was it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe pen slipped and capered on the page, \u003cbr\u003eescorted by ripplings in the atmosphere\u003cbr\u003elike breeze with nothing to blow against.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"We wear no form or figure of our own\u003cbr\u003e--a wisp, a thread, a twig, a shred of smoke--\u003cbr\u003eto tell us from the motions of the air.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe'd love to live in even a bubble,\u003cbr\u003eto wrap around its glossy diaphanous,\u003cbr\u003ereaching and rounding, as slinkily real\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eas a morning stretch or a dance in a field.\u003cbr\u003eBut we know only this air, and memory,\u003cbr\u003eonce, or several times, removed and turned,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe pang of a once-had, a maybe-again,\u003cbr\u003ethat shifting half-light, our home and habitat,\u003cbr\u003ethose hours, soft-toned, windless, that favor passage, \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe usual relay of twilights. And, \u003cbr\u003ehow often a century? The sun eclipsed,\u003cbr\u003ethat 'created' half-light, not dusk or dawn:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eus glowing through, our light, our element,\u003cbr\u003ein which we show best, glow best, what we are.\u003cbr\u003eYesterday some snowflakes slipped through us, \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003erefreshing kisses passing through our heat.\u003cbr\u003eAh, we wanted to say. If we could have,\u003cbr\u003ewe'd have laughed right out from sheer surprise.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd what else? \"We've got you to stand for us.\"\u003cbr\u003eAnd I have you, I said, to float for me. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eCôte d'Azur\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOut of the blue, one of them lipped to me:\u003cbr\u003e\"A handful of days can hold a whole life,\u003cbr\u003esunlight dazzling on a blue foaming sea,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe touch of a body and nothing more,\u003cbr\u003eone whisper which was the very whisper\u003cbr\u003efor which you had waited hour after hour,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003emaybe not the same words, not the same voice,\u003cbr\u003eall those words other and voice still other,\u003cbr\u003ethe ring of unknown words, those were the ones.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe hand that held my pen began to shine:\u003cbr\u003e\"How sad are those who borrow their solace\u003cbr\u003efrom several days never to return,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003esome incident of passion or promise,\u003cbr\u003esome glimpse...\" \"Oh yes, but sadder still are those\u003cbr\u003ewho never bask on even that brief beach.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow blue the sea looked; it shone and \u003ci\u003ethey\u003c\/i\u003e shone;\u003cbr\u003enow they glittered with an utter glitter,\u003cbr\u003enow they beamed, for this was their greatest \u003ci\u003eyes\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The special few are those who live full joys,\u003cbr\u003enot a day, a week or a mooncycle\u003cbr\u003ebut an extension of years, or a life.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"Chimera on the surface of the sea,\u003cbr\u003ehaze that lies heavy on a salty sea,\u003cbr\u003ehaze hovering over a summer sea,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003edespite the scintillations of the sun.\"\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Where will all this lead? It will lead \u003ci\u003enowhere\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNowhere at all\u003c\/i\u003e is where we want to go.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA blue \u003ci\u003enowhere\u003c\/i\u003e made up of blue nothing,\u003cbr\u003ea moment of bliss lasting a moment,\u003cbr\u003elong enough for life, that long and no more.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e**To download a free broadside of this poem go to: http:\/\/www.knopfpoetry.com\/broadsides.html","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304304660709,"sku":"NP9780375709784","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375709784.jpg?v=1767743489","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/visits-from-the-seventh-isbn-9780375709784","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}