Sarah Arvio

Stunning poems of obsession, loss, and the desire for a renewed self, from the award-winning poet and translator of Lorca. I thought I had left behind the darkness / of the heart, Arvio confesses in the poem Small War. The love Arvio traces in these pages is indeed a battle, one in which the best-laid plans are shattered. Rarely has a poet tackled intimate love with so much invention and bravery. In poem after poem, we meet the troubling lover whose nearness and force undoes her. There are moments of reprieve: my naked body and budding pleasure / in the weather of your presence. / Not whether your presence but how. The voice is vulnerable, self-knowing, often funny; the poet seems to be writing these poems to save herself from a damaging passion. Her weapons are a cascade of gorgeous ten-syllable lines and a powerful command of metaphor, wielded in a search for meaning and understanding rather than in devastation. These breathtaking love poems make the collection Arvio's most universal to date.

For the first time in a quarter century, a major new volume of translations of the beloved poetry of Federico Garc a Lorca, presented in a beautiful bilingual edition The fluid and mesmeric lines of these new translations by the award-winning poet Sarah Arvio bring us closer than ever to the talismanic perfection of the great Garc a Lorca. Poet in Spain invokes the "wild, innate, local surrealism" of the Spanish voice, in moonlit poems of love and death set among poplars, rivers, low hills, and high sierras. Arvio's ample and rhythmically rich offering includes, among other essential works, the folkloric yet modernist Gypsy Ballads, the plaintive flamenco Poem of the Cante Jondo, and the turbulent and beautiful Dark Love Sonnets--addressed to Lorca's homosexual lover--which Lorca was revising at the time of his brutal political murder by Fascist forces in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Here, too, are several lyrics translated into English for the first time and the play Blood Wedding--also a great tragic poem. Arvio has created a fresh voice for Lorca in English, full of urgency, pathos, and lyricism--showing the poet's work has grown only more beautiful with the passage of time.

In this remarkable and unique work, award-winning poet Sarah Arvio gives us a memoir about coming to terms with a life in crisis through the study of dreams. As a young woman, threatened by disturbing visions, Arvio went into psychoanalysis to save herself. The result is a riveting sequence of dream poems, followed by "Notes." The poems, in the form of irregular sonnets, describe her dreamworld: a realm of beauty and terror emblazoned with recurring colors and images--gold, blood red, robin's-egg blue, snakes, swarms of razors, suitcases, playing cards, a catwalk. The Notes, also exquisitely readable, unfold the meaning of the dreams--as told to her analyst--and recount the enlightening and sometimes harrowing process of unlocking memories, starting with the diaries she burned to make herself forget. Arvio's explorations lead her back to her younger self--and to a life-changing understanding that will fascinate readers. An utterly original work of art and a groundbreaking portrayal of the power of dream interpretation to resolve psychic distress, this stunning book illumines the poetic logic of the dreaming mind; it also shows us, with surpassing poignancy, how tender and fragile is the mind of an adolescent girl.

Sarah Arvio is a highly original American poet. This book includes the whole of her second collection "Sono" and selections from her first book "Visits from the Seventh", with an audio CD of her reading all of "Sono". Composed during a long stay in Rome, the cantos of "Sono" look outward in order to look inward, transforming sights and stories into expressionistic explorations of the state of the heart. Playful, probing, philosophical, colorful, often funny, they describe a struggle to come to terms with loss and grief and to find a basis for renewal. Riffing expertly, Sarah Arvio brings wit and exquisite formal discipline to her gorgeous meditations on the life lived. These are high-burning songs of the self - colloquial, sexy, unflinching and unforgettable. In "Visits from the Seventh", her wry, uncanny poems take the form of conversations between a woman and a throng of invisible presences, or 'visitors', who counsel, challenge, cajole and comfort her. Together they murmur about destiny, the moon, a walk on Park Avenue, sex, ambition, dreams.

Here is Sono, a new collection of bracingly original poems, from the prizewinning author of Visits from the Seventh. Composed during a long stay in Rome, these cantos look outward in order to look inward, transforming sights and stories into expressionistic explorations of the state of the heart. Playful, probing, philosophical, colorful, often funny, they describe a struggle to come to terms with loss and grief and to find a basis for renewal; they ask whether and how life is worth living, taking pleasure in the questions themselves. "It wasn't the life I would have wanted, / had I known what sort of life I did want," starts the poem entitled "Chagrin." "I do believe I was never loved," announces "Obelisk." Riffing expertly, Sarah Arvio brings wit and exquisite formal discipline to her gorgeous meditations on the life lived. These are high-burning songs of the self-- colloquial, sexy, unflinching, and unforgettable. A colossal mess I made of my life, in the flesh and also in the round;this was the essence of colosseum, the museum of my colossal shame, where I mused on the blood sport of it all. . . (from "Colosseum")