selected reviews
MAY 8, 2006
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The poems in Arvio’s second collection are described as cantos, and they show almost as much allusive range as those of Pound himself. Written in pithy, often playful tercets, these verses (many set in Rome, where Arvio has a home) frequently begin with a simple string of words that serves as the basis for assonant riffing; “I was wandering in a quandary” becomes “and never without a qualm or a pang, / and thinking of taking a quantum leap / out of my quondam life and into yours.” Arvio deploys insights from philosophy, psychology, and physics, but a constant preoccupation is that language constructs the things it attempts to describe, and in this her clearest forebear is Stevens, to whose “palm at the end of the mind” she alludes in the first and final poems.
Christopher Bakken, “The Sybil of Rome,” in American Book Review
Douglas Basford, in The Hopkins Review
Frederic Koeppel in The Memphis Commercial Appeal
Fred Johnstone in Tears in the Fence
Robert Pinsky in The Washington Post Poet’s Choice
Edward Hirsch in The Washington Post Poet’s Choice
FEBRUARY 18, 2002
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LARGE TE
“Visits from the Seventh” (Knopf;; $22)
This extraordinary first book of poems takes its place in an authentic line of descent from such landmarks as Yeats's "A Vision" and James Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover." A series of forty-nine narratives detail conversations with those in the hereafter—who, it turns out, are no more reliable than their earthly counterparts, a cast of "gypsies and fantasists, conmen and creeps." But the true subject here is the emotional cost of such celestial intimacies for the human narrator, whose future must always remain hidden. For her, loneliness and mortality are not merely conditions to be recalled but present afflictions to be endured, and she can only pray, "Give me what I can bear to know I felt."♦
