For all Sarah Arvio’s obvious intelligence, culture, technical adroitness and articulacy, I struggled with this book. In the end I didn’t feel the struggle brought anything like enough reward.
My feeling of a fundamental aridity was at its most acute in Sono. The poem – a sequence of forty-two “cantos” arranged in generally blank verse triplets – seems to have an underlying story of a love affair gone wrong, and on this basis the poet reflects ramblingly on lost love, sex and life in a Roman setting. The writing can flash briefly into imagistic vividness or pathos, and it may be that some readers would find more to empathise with in the experiences described than I do, but again and again moments of imagination, thought and feeling drain away in wide deserts of barren word-spinning, apparently driven by nothing but similarities of sound. Admittedly in relaxed moments this can give the pleasure of inventive play, but not often.
The poems in the second half of the book, from Visits from the Seventh, offer themselves as conversations between the poet and a crowd of invisible presences. The prevailing tercets are varied by some poems in quatrains and one in five line stanzas, though as rhyme is very occasional this formal difference doesn’t in itself have a tremendous impact. However, the lines are generally rhythmically suppler and more springy than those of Sono and the poems are much more varied in tone, voice, attitude and feeling. The writing is more playful, sexier, more intellectually and imaginatively alert, and sprinkled with visually evocative, lightly sensuous and voluptuous passages that I did enjoy reading. The sequence’s fiction of conversation has its own drama and suggestiveness. In this half of the volume I had a much more definite feeling of reading the work of a real writer. Overall, though, this section too was too diffuse.
Sarah Arvio is a lecturer in creative writing at Princeton, and worked for many years as a translator. She knows words and clearly loves them, but as one reads her there’s almost a sense that for her the spinning out of words in metrical form is an end in itself, not needing a specific imaginative or emotional occasion. Sometimes the writing does catch fire, almost incidentally, but then the fire dies and the writing goes on. If she could apply her powers in a more centred and concentrated way she would produce something I would really look forward to reading.
Edmund Prestwich