WIKIPEDIA When Sarah Arvio published her first book, Visits from the Seventh (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) she was in her late forties—joining a distinguished group of lateblooming American poets. Visits was greeted with acclaim and surprise, with the poet critic Richard Howard announcing, “I love the voices, they are the woman herself,” and Mark Strand calling it “an orphic chorus of quixotic voices...” Her second book, Sono: cantos, written during a long stay in Rome, is a passionate and lyrical monologue about the power of language to recreate the self.

Christopher Bakken remarked in American Book Review: “An idea of grace evolves throughout Sono: the sense that poetic accidents, however silly, however revealing, do not arise from within the mind alone, but are given, undeserved, from outside the poet.”

In his Washington Post “Poet’s Choice” column, Robert Pinsky proclaimed that this was “wit on a rampage, dramatizing its own excessive drama, generating a sense of desperation as well as knowledge.” Calling it “not quite a mad song, but nearly,” he went on to say that Sono “reminds us that the term ‘wit’ can mean the mind itself.”

Bloodaxe brought out a combined edition of the two books in 2009, with an audio cd of Sono. \ Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New Republic, as well as in Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Raritan, Southwest Review, Poetry, and many other literary reviews; they have also been featured several times on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, the website of the Best American Poetry, and in other web venues.

John Koethe, who chose five of Arvio’s more recent poems to win Boston Review’s annual poetry contest for 2008, declares that her voice is like no one else’s in American letters. He goes on to remark that her poetry seems to “emanate from a kind of psychic doppelganger, originating from an imagined self somewhere outside her and passing through her on the way to the reader. It writes the self from which it issues, rather than the other way around, and is constructed out of wordplay and verbal associations... Most poetry involves verbal associations at the level of sound, but seldom in as undisguised a fashion as Arvio’s. The results are poems that possess both an eerie psychological presence and a blunt verbal materiality.”

Other awards include the Rome Prize of the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bogliasco Fellowship (for 2012), and the B.F. Conners Prize of the Paris Review.

In a recent interview for Poetry London, C.K. Williams said that Arvio’s poems “have a way of using their music to generate their plots, and they end up being both apparently whimsical, but at the same time passionate.” She has performed in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum, at Princeton in the James Stewart Theater, in Boston for the Grolier at Harvard, and in New York at the KGB Bar, the Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place (Future Projection), and the National Arts Club (Page), among many other venues.

The New Zealand composer Miriama Young set “Cote d’Azur” from Visits; it was performed by the tenor John Gilchrist and the Nash Ensemble at Princeton in 2005. Reset for mezzosoprano, it was performed again, by Rebecca Ringle and the New Millennium Ensemble, also at Princeton, in 2006. Two poems from Sono have been set to music. William Bolcom set “Chagrin” in his song cycle “The Hawthorn Tree” for the mezzosoprano Joyce Castle, who in 2010 sang it at the Morgan Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the Dia Foundation and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Steven Burke’s rendering of “Armor” was sung in 2009 by Mary Nessinger at Symphony Space in New York and elsewhere.

Arvio has worked at the United Nations Headquarters in NY and the UN office in Geneva since 1993 as a freelance translator. Her personal essay “Salmat,” on poetry and terrorism, which appeared in the special poetry issue of The Antioch Review in 2009, unfolds at UN headquarters. Between 2007 and 2009 she was a guest lecturer in poetry at Princeton.

links: www.saraharvio.com the new yorker for two reviews and two poems the new republic for two poems poetry magazine for antonella anedda