Visits from the Seventh
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- ¥2,000
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
Visits from the Seventh is a highly original debut. Arvio's wry, uncanny poems take the form of conversations between a woman and a throng on invisible presences--visitors, as she calls them--who counsel, challenge, cajole and comfort her. Together they murmur about destiny, the moon, a walk on Park Avenue, sex, ambition, dreams.
"Poets," writes Richard Howard, "find remarkable ways to talk to themselves, to divide and triumph, to split the speech-atom--'the journal of my other self,' Rilke called it. For women poets, (Christina Rossetti, say, or Virginia Woolf) voices from 'outside' are minatory; for men they are merely the Muse. Arvio has listened hard and heedfully to these hauntings of hers, certainly the most 'convincing' visitations since Merrill's Ouija-board transcriptions, and has arranged her overhearing in the readiest manner for her own listeners: the careful, shapely stanzas; the clear conundrum of spirit possession, which is Arvio's poetic incarnation. The whole series is an articulation of what we used to call 'the inner life': one woman's passionate questioning of her sources, and their equally passionate (if often derisive) answers. She has forged her own dialogue of the dead, somehow managing to be funny and erotic at once, pursued and in possession. I love hearing her persuasive voices; they are the woman herself."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arvio's debut collection charts a series of visitations by a gaggle of spectral spirits, whose chattering presence our "extra-sensed" speaker invokes "often, in lieu of human contact." Arvio's sprites eschew the larger metaphysical and historical concerns of James Merrill's Ephraim et al. for the wryly personal and domestic: love, memory, desire, "your plight, your purpose, your oh/ so necessary struggles and strivings." They verbalize through the pen the speaker carries with her at all times to channel her "seventh sense" ("the sixth is sex, silly"), which allows her to tell a story of love, loss and the flickers that remain: "a vast web of eventualities/ traced negative of the verso of life:/ verging, converging and parting again,// or radiating from a single verb,/ never ever to return or meet," as one voice puts it. While this metaphor for a loss so great the speaker retreats into her own mind and projects her internal voices outward is a powerful one, Arvio's spirits sound like rattling aristocrats; their speech sprinkled with "darling" and "love" and such exclamations as "we covet water though which light will ride/ and you, my dear." Such portentous oratory often gives way to elaborate word games in which the ever-more-demanding and indistinguishable ghostly voices spin out puns and associative jokes, which finally can't hold the poems together. Still, readers may be content to stroll along for the view while the speaker tries to maintain "a light happiness, a levity,/ empty and sweet and pleased to be alive,/ a walk a day along Park Avenue."
