Charlottesville Words

New Dominion Bookshop will host Sarah Arvio for a discussion and signing of her work on Friday, April 25 at 5:30 pm.

From the author of Visits from the Seventh (“This extraordinary first book of poems takes its place in an authentic line of descent from such landmarks as Yeats’s A Vision and James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover” —The New Yorker), a new collection of bracingly original poems.

The interior narratives in Sono, many of which spring from an Italian setting or mood, begin with simple questions and statements: “Did I matter?” “I was walking on Via Veneto.” “I do believe I was never loved.” Spinning meaning through plays on words and words with similar sounds, Arvio brings wit and exquisite formal discipline to her powerful reflections on abandonment, isolation, disappointment, regret, hope, and joy. “Would you engrave my body with your hands,” she asks in “Graffito.” “It wasn’t the life I would have wanted / had I known what sort f life I did want,” she asserts in “Chagrin.” With Sono, Arvio gives us high-burning songs of the self: colloquial, sexy, unflinching, and unforgettable.

From “Colosseum”

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,

where I longed for the lust of the lions.

Here was my game, the name of my sin,

for I never threw men to the lions

or rose from my lair or ate men like air.

For Sarah Arvio’s first book of poems, Visits from the Seventh (Knopf, 2002), she won the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her second book, Sono: cantos (Knopf, 2006) was written during her stay at the American Academy in Rome. A selection from those two books, translated into Italian by Antonella Anedda, was recently published in the Italian monthly Poeti e Poesie (Rome). Her poems have appeared in such places as The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Poetry, Raritan, Southwest Review, and the online journals Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Cortland Review and Archipelago. For many years a translator at the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she now teaches at Princeton.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Filed under: authors, books, charlottesville, reading, virginia Tagged: | New Dominion Bookshop, poems, poetry, poetry readings, Sarah Arvio, Sono