Sono Cantos

Here isSono,a new collection of bracingly original poems, from the prizewinning author ofVisits 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")

Sarah Arvio was born in 1954 and grew up near New York City. For Visits from the Seventh (2002), her first book of poems, she won the Rome Prize and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. Poems in that volume were awarded The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Prize and Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize. Arvio works as a translator for the United Nations.


From the Hardcover edition.