Sono
Cantos
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
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")
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arvio's sophomore follow-up to Visits from the Seventh (2002), reckons with the "Interior Ostracism" fostered by a life's disappointments and regrets almost all relationship-based. Often set against belittling examples of Roman grandeur (portrayed in titles like "Colosseum," "Sistine" and "Pantheon"), many poems begin with self-deprecating observations ("I was trammeled, I thought, by tragedy"), grim questions ("So, was there something grand in all this grief ") or wavering assertions ("I was saying I never had a care,/ meaning maybe that I was free of care,/ or else meaning that no one cared for me"). Most then proceed through clever vacillations ("I was a sister or I was a saint,/ maybe a gilded statue of Venus,/ sporting a halo or wearing a hat") and stunning sonic associations ("the prison or prism of myself") to arrive at painful confessions: "Oh boy, boy, I know I broke your heart/ with my broken song, I know I was wrong." While repetition of strategies and subjects throughout these 43 poems composed of nine or 10 strict tercets each eventually dulls some of the book's punch, Arvio has crafted a humorous, unflinching arrow of self-assertion via self-revelation: Sono means "I am" in Italian.
