night thoughts
70 dream poems & notes from an analysis
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This raw and affecting third collection from Arvio (Sono: Cantos) is really two brief books in one. First, unrhymed sonnets in plain yet vivid language describe a series of Arvio's dreams; second, the poet recalls the childhood troubles that she came to understand through psychoanalysis, in prose that annotates the sonnets but reads like a journal. The sonnets combine the immediacy of memory with the insistent symbolism of dreams; in one "I'm sloughing something but what I don't know/ out of the sea dream out of the deep self." Blood, blades, snakes, beds, and other totemic items invite us to interpret, as Arvio later does: "a black slip with a lace decolletage" becomes "the black slip in which I'll die." These sonnets give up more of their secrets in the prose, where many clues point back to sexual trauma that neighborhood boys inflicted on the poet before her teens. At one point in the analysis came "the first time I had the sense that there was more to know about my suffering and that I might be able to find it." Some readers may find themselves put off by the conventions of psychoanalytic interpretation; others may read Arvio' s serious discoveries for insight both into the poet, and into themselves.
