Visits from the Seventh

by Sarah Arvio

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 of 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 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."

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually a 4.5, rounded down.

Sarah Arvio's Visits from the Seventh are a sequence of conversations with a seemingly endless and nameless group of beings/people. They come to Arvio and narrate her interior world making the poems at once intensely personal and decidedly not confessional. These are not narrations of the poet's thoughts, feelings, and experience, but rather transcriptions of an understanding far larger that simply Arvio's experience. From "Waiting":

"What's the heaviest word in the language?"
"Wait." "Oh but want is heavier than wait"
"But want with wait is even heavier."

Each poem captures the interactions of the "visitors" with one another and with Arvio as voices of the dead, of the mind, of dreams and interpretations. There is a sense of near-narrative that pervades these forty-nine poems (a valuable number if we choose to look at it that way--seven squared visits of the seventh sense) and each piece seems both connected to and distinct from the poems that it abuts. The collection tells of the growth of poetic and artistic identity--like the many references to the pen and the transcription of the "visits" like "Static Interference"--an awakening to self-awareness--the primary sense of the poems, particularly in ones like "Park Avenue", "Poison Apples", and "Lilies"--and other personal details about the poet's childhood, romantic life, etc., but always through the lens of conversations with a group of knowledgeable, caring, and fundamentally disinterested observers. This means that even poems like "Motherlessness" and "Memory"--which hint at terrible loss and abuse--feel very much distant from the events they describe. This is not a book of poems about things, but a book of poems about reactions to things, about learning from things, about the long process of digesting and understanding the world one lives in more than the world itself.
The collection is divided into two "Rounds" of visits, and the while both rounds are lyrical, concise, and compelling, the second round is far more dependent on clever and effective wordplay (present in both sections), if sometimes less serious in nature (although the two sections are fundamentally similar in tone and topic). Compare "A Leaf" to "Memory".
"A Leaf":

ADDRESS ME, I said, and I meant "please speak."
"Oh you mean UNDRESS ME," one said and turned.
Had I meant "take off my dress"? "What," said one,

"is your address?" My dress was green as moss,
as pine, as weed, as seafoam, as a leaf.
What did I say? I said GREEN AS A LEAF

not GREEN AS BELIEF. Belief was "a leaf
no one should wear." "Take off belief and wear
a dress" Belief was "no address at all."

From "Memory"

"And do we remember our living lives?"
Did I remember te clock or the door,
or the words "I love you" or the word "why";
did he recall the blue vein in my wrist
or only the ice-blue burn in my eye?

What remained of the room and of the night,
the kiss or the argument that ensued?. . .

Did I recall the cocktail as it smashed

against the wall there, so close to my eye
did I forget why I left my home, why?
The full events of that terrible time
dissolving into the deep hues of dusk
and leaving essence to the inner eye.

Each poem adds to the overall effect of the sequence, and makes the work powerful and effective as an exploration of one poet's inner life without the potentially claustrophobic sensations that can accompany these sorts of personal revelations.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love a big poetry project, and this is a big ambitious one. I also love an author with enough confidence to write from within an unusual world or worldview without trying to describe it to the reader, just writing as though it is perfectly natural and letting the reader figure it out from there. After reading the first 1/3 of the book, I finally felt I had a good enough grasp of who was who and what was happening, so that I started the book again to see what I had missed in my earlier confusion. The first half of the book had more substance but sometimes lacked poetic diction. The second half was full of wordplay, which too often became gratuitious (but when it worked, it really worked.) This is a fun imaginative book though.

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely agree with the reviewer who wrote that she appreciates poets who just write--from a strange or unusual or hard-to-understand perspective--without needing to explain themselves. It's one of many things I loved about Visits from the Seventh, a series of poem-conversations with... visitors, or ghosts, or voices. Like so many of my favorite poetry books, this is best read in one sitting... or in several concentrated sittings... best when you can let yourself become immersed in the world of the poems. The more I read, the more I felt myself slipping into the book, and the more I loved and appreciated its beautiful, sometimes moving, sometimes funny strangeness.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great first book of poems. Sono is till my favorite.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 A795v 2002

[SA · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sigh.