Memory

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Memory

Sarah Arvio
2002

Sarah Arvio's poem "Memory" is one of forty-nine poems collected in her first book, Visits to the Seventh, published in June 2003 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York. Poems in this collection capture traces of dialogue between a woman and several ethereal presences; they talk about the break-up of the woman's love affair and the death of her mother. In "Memory," which first appeared in Raritan Quarterly, the poet examines remembrances of the lovers' quarrel that lead to the break-up. Visits to the Seventh marks Arvio's literary debut, accomplished by Arvio in her forties after publishing poetry in several literary journals such as Poetry, The Paris Review, and Best American Poetry 1998. The poet's dialogues with these visitors—either ghosts of the dead, the voice of Arvio's inner life or a chorus of her poetic muses—speak to the meaning of life and the sense of longing created by the insufficiency of memory. "Memory," like most of Arvio's poems in this collection, is written in free verse, the term typically used to describe nonmetrical and unrhymed poetry, common among contemporary poets. Metrical verse derives its structure from a set of formal rules for the length and arrangement of each line. Arvio groups her poems in stanzas often linked together by lines that continue a thought, a piece of dialogue or an action into the following stanza.

Author Biography

Sarah Arvio, author of "Memory" and other poems collected in her first volume of poetry, Visits from the Seventh, was born in 1954 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up near New York City among radical Quakers. She was educated at schools abroad and later attended Columbia University, where she studied writing. Arvio could not envision herself as a creative writer, she told Borzoi Reader for its website, until she began undergoing psychoanalysis and studying her dreams. "When I thought about writing my own words, I imagined pressing down so hard on the pen that I broke the nib," Arvio said. "When I looked inward I saw nothing but turmoil and grief. I couldn't realize my thoughts; I had a voice but couldn't use it." Soon after turning forty, Arvio found her poetic voice, the product of an "open, amazed mood" that allowed her to listen to her thoughts. She told Borzoi Reader: "I found my own thoughts intriguing and even beautiful."

It was not until she was in her forties that Arvio was able to publish her first collection of poems, which critics have hailed as a highly original debut. Arvio has supported herself as a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland. Visits from the Seventh was published in June 2002 by Alfred A. Knopf. The first eleven poems in this collection won The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize and were reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1998. Other poems from her first book won Poetry's Frederick Bock Prize. In 2003, Arvio was awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "Memory" was first published in Raritan Quarterly, a humanities journal published by Rutgers University. Arvio has published poetry in literary magazines such as The Paris Review, Poetry, Southwest Review, and Literary Imagination. She also has translated literary works, such as Fray Ramôn Panâe's short story, "How the Men Were Parted from the Women," which appeared in the anthology The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories.

Poem Text

"And do we remember our living lives?"
Did I remember the 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?     5

What remained of the room and of the night,
the kiss or the argument that ensued?
"You see, our memories are much like yours,
here a shadow, a sound, a shred, a wisp …"
"And do we want to remember?" one said.     10
"Never never Oh give me the blurred wish
or the dream or the fact half-forgotten,
the leaf in the book but not the read page,
not what I saw but what I felt I saw,
not what I felt but how I wished to feel,     15
give me what I can bear to know I felt."
I choose to recall only the blue dusk.
"Do you think you choose? If only you could
determine your secret determinants."
Did I recall the cocktail as it smashed     20

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.     25

Poem Summary

Stanza 1

In "Memory," a woman still suffering from the break-up with her lover is addressed by the invisible "visitors" who inhabit a "seventh" dimension, the "sixth" being sex, which they have explained in poems that precede this one in the collection. The first line begins with their question: "And do we remember our living lives?"—our lives as they were lived without the revision of memory? In the first, five-line stanza, the woman in the poem recalls the details of a daily life in which strife and death are temporarily absent—details such as the clock measuring seemingly endless time or the door in which a lover enters. Near the end of this stanza, however, the reader becomes unable to deny what is coming, tipped off by language escalating in emotion from the almost quotidian though tender "I love you" to an urgent and anguished "why?" What caused the argument, which the poet does not actually discuss in detail in the poem. What was its now elusive trigger? What did the speaker mean to the lover who broke from her?

Stanza 2

In the second stanza, lines 6 through 10, the poet's unseen visitors reveal to her that death does not take the sting out of memory, improve the quality of its ability to record events, or resolve its conundrums. "You see," the visitors say, "our memories are much like yours, / here a shadow, a sound, a shred, a wisp." But they also frame for her the choice that she has, which will allow her to put aside memory's puzzle. "And what do we want to remember?" one said.

Stanzas 3 and 4

The third and fourth stanzas describe the poet's immediate rebellion. She believes she can improve her memories by summoning the courage to relive the terribly painful emotions this catastrophic lover's quarrel provoked. The third stanza begins, in the first three of five lines, as the poet's prayer: "Never never Oh give me the blurred wish / or the dream or the fact half-forgotten, the leaf in the book but not the read page." She asks for even more, not merely the facts but what they meant, what she can bear to know.

Stubbornly, perhaps, the woman in the poem tells her visitors in the next stanza that she has made a choice. "I recall only the blue dusk," the aftermath of dissolution in its sad and non-negotiable finality, and not the climactic pain of her last argument. But her visitors, made wise by the transformation of death and the realities of life in the untouchable seventh dimension, attempt to be instructive about the inevitable nature of memory. "Do you think you choose?" they say. "If only you could determine your secret determinates." The last line of this penultimate stanza reveals the poet's immediate reconsideration of her desire to overrule memory as it leads us to the poem's end. Her anguish is once again poignantly apparent.

Stanza 5

In lines 23 to 25 of the last stanza, the narrator's acknowledgement of "that terrible time" recedes, yielding again to the blue transition of dusk and leaving only the essence of catastrophe to the realm of "the inner eye."

Themes

Longing for Life

"Memory" continues to look at the paradox these invisible visitors present to the woman in the poem—her inability to fully examine and appreciate life while she is in the middle of living it, and the visitors' urge to go back to resolve their own issues now that they have the benefit of a perspective earned through death. Other poems in the collection delicately examine the visitors' state of being and their desire to use the woman in these poems vicariously. In this poem, the visitors serve as psychological mentors attempting to instruct her in how to manage the same things they do, such as the pain of loss, while grasping at the straws of memory to make sense of it all.

The Unreliability of Memory

"Memory" examines the distortion of the memory, making it impossible to reassess or sort out events and how they affected not only self-perception but also perceptions of an important, once-loving relationship. The visitors may identify with the woman in the poem, but they are also critical that she does not understand the futility of what she is doing.

Unresolved Issues

The woman in "Memory" longs to know if the last argument she had with her lover killed not only the relationship but also the attraction they once had for each other. She combs her memories, hunting for clues, but can only relive the emotions—regret, anger and fear—that she felt during the argument.

Style

Contemporary Poem

The internal structure of Arvio's poem "Memory" is, unlike a galloping, faithfully iambic Victorian epic, informal and therefore unobtrusive. This allows the poet to construct lines that sound like conversation to the reader. The flexibility of free verse allows the poet a series of stressed syllables, which give the lines a special poetic weight. For example, in the lines "did he recall the blue vein in my wrist / or only the ice-blue burn in my eye?" the poet uses the pounding cadence of "ice-blue burn" to emphasize the anger the argument elicited. Though the poem is relatively informal, Arvio uses sonic devices to emphasize other elements in the poem. The word "why" is rhymed at the end of a line with the word "eye" in the first stanza and again in the final stanza. The structure of the poem may not be guided by the rules of formal convention, but the poem does have symmetry. The poem is composed of five stanzas of five lines each, a neatness that echoes the suggestion of acceptance at the end. The third, fourth and fifth stanzas are each linked by a line that continues a thought introduced in the stanza above it, which reflects the poet's evolving perspective. A dramatic unity is suggested by the rhyming pattern established in the first stanza and repeated in the last. The poem makes maximum use of the word "blue"—a blue vein, ice-blue anger, blue dusk. The opposite of blue, the warmer shades of yellow that Arvio examines in other poems in this collection, is absent, as is red—the color typically associated with both passion and rage. In this poem, memory has rendered all facets of a lover's quarrel and its aftermath in monochromatic hues.

Topics For Further Study

Read the rest of the poems collected in Arvio's first volume of poetry, Visits from the Seventh. Compare Arvio's poems with the poetry of other American women such as Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, Denise Levertov and Rita Dove. What makes these poems uniquely feminine?
What elements of poetic structure does Arvio employ in "Memory" and other poems in Visits from the Seventh? What might their function be? Compare the structure of this poem with the structure of a poem by a modern formalist poet such as Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur or Anthony Hecht as well as neo-formalists such as Rhina P. Espaillat, Dick Davis and Dana Giola.
What might the color blue represent in the poem "Memory?" Compare the use of blue in this poem to the use of pink, yellow, white, green and aqua in other poems in this collection. How does color allow the poet to create not only a picture in the mind's eye, but also a mood?
Compare the supernatural voices captured by Ephraim and the others in James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover. What relationship do they have with their human medium? How do these supernatural conversations differ from those that spring from the relationship Arvio's unseen visitors have with the woman in Arvio's poetry?

Historical Context

Contemporary Poetry

"Memory" is part of a collection of poems that reflect contemporary life in New York City, a city familiar to many Americans, even those who only know the city through movies or the pages of the New Yorker. These sometimes funny and erotic poems reflect the world view of a highly educated woman, one who laces her lines with French phrases, references to other poets and classic Hitchcock movies. The woman in these poems is the perfect audience for the aristocratic ramblings of the chorus of invisible visitors that people her work. In contemporary, post-feminist poetry, women writers can enjoy the fruits of liberation from the mandatory roles of child-rearing and housewifery. Their bold, witty work shows how able they are to avoid the self-destructive impulses evident in the poetry of some women writing a generation before, such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Poet Mark Strand, writing for the back of the book, asserts that these poems are neither sad nor confessional. Simply put, a confessional poem is one in which the poet speaks to the reader.

But Rob Neufeld, writing for the Asheville Citizen-Times and once a friend of Arvio's, disagrees. "The poems are, in good measure, confessional and we'd be cheated if they weren't," Neufeld writes, describing the glimpse of the poet taking a contemplative walk down Park Avenue in one poem. Other admirers of Arvio's work, such as New York poet Richard Howard, find links to Arvio's work to that of earlier women writers, such as Christina Rosetti and Virginia Woolf, because of its attentive interest in internal rather than external voices. "The whole series is an articulation of what we used to call 'the inner life': one woman's passionate questioning of her sources," he said. "Memory" is feminine in its self-conscious reflection on lost love and its ear to internal voices, but it is especially contemporary in its un-self-conscious ownership of anger, eroticism and humor. With this freedom, perhaps, comes the insistent flowering of a strong and compelling poetic voice at an age—past forty—that publishers apparently consider to be rare. Contemporary poetry has further pushed the boundaries of language, image, form and voice. Part of Arvio's cultural contribution might be helping to break through another artistic barrier that has constrained and discouraged writers, male and female alike.

Critical Overview

"Memory" is one of forty-nine poems in an award-winning collection hailed as a highly original debut, admired as "a splendidly odd and compelling first book" by the Washington Post. Post critic Edward Hirsch enjoys Arvio's "nervy, fanciful and unified" poetry and commends her attentiveness to her supernatural guests by calling her a "spiritual apprentice." Roy Olson, writing in Booklist, notes that the "poems sparkle with worldly wise wit." Critics and fellow poets enjoy the uniqueness of Arvio's dialogue with the supernatural visitors, and her ability to be both simultaneously funny and erotic in these contemporary odes to life. "Sarah Arvio's poems engage in an agitated description of the inner life," said poet Mark Strand, quoted on the back of Arvio's book. "The voices drop in and out like a beautiful quixotic chorus." Judy Clarence of the Library Journal commends Arvio's competence as a poet in avoiding the pitfalls of engaging the supernatural, which she calls "dangerous ground." "Writers who venture in the realm of the occult risk banality," Clarence says, adding that "Arvio's prodigious talent saves her."

Criticism

Lisa Trow

Trow is a published poet and writer. In this essay, Trow considers the value of employing super-natural voices as a poetic conceit.

"Memory" and other poems in Sarah Arvio's Visits from the Seventh give scant, if any, evidence of how the poet's upbringing in a strict Quaker household, and her subsequent psychoanalysis, affected her poetic voice. These poems are not unique because of their singular cultural references. The only archaisms in speech are the quirky and affected terms of endearment used by the poet's aristocratic invisible visitors. The anger and eroticism of this and other poems are not overblown in the rebellion of an unusually chaste or strict religious environment. "Memory" is not steeped in the self-conscious or hypercritical assessments of the heavily psychoanalyzed. Instead, this poem is open to any woman who experiences the shock of losing a love that had, before the unexpected catastrophe of argument, become a beloved fixture of life.

The origin of the poetry's wry and New York-worldly sense of humor that critics embrace when discussing this unusual collection of poems is not a surprise. Arvio is an educated, already well-decorated poet of diverse professional skills who knows New York City well. But what is unusual is the conceit on which the entire book is founded, a group of visitors—unseen, even to the poet—and their supernatural origin. They are souls who derive their sense of humor and the influence of their commentary from the vantage point of death. While other poets, such as Nobel Prize winner Wistawa Szymborska, unifies the poems of one collection with observations on the human callousness inherent in acts such as terrorism, Arvio constructs an interactive Greek chorus of dead souls and builds a book around their conversations with her.

The chorus seemingly understands its role before the poet does. She is instructed later in the collection, after having become aware of them through the exercise of a post-sexual seventh sense. "'It might / be best," one said, 'to call us a conceit.'" But what purpose does this conceit serve? The voices move in and out of these poems and sometimes require pointed invitations to appear. When they do appear, they cajole and tease, filling in for missing human equivalents, such as a mother who has died, or a lover who has left. To accentuate their elusiveness, these visitors require, like supernatural beings in any genre, that the woman in these poems keep quiet about them or risk losing contact. In "Memory," which appears more than half way into the collection, their capricious playfulness is absent. It is replaced by a more sober consciousness in possession of a secret that has eluded their human companion, who is now preoccupied with the violent quarrel that ended an important romance.

"Memory" is not a fun poem or one of the more lyrical in the collection. This is a pre-memorial poem, written after the death of love but before it is buried. The distance between the poet and her unseen muses is close, more personal and less transcendent. They sit on her shoulder, looking into her past without enjoying the view, something they take particular pleasure in doing in other poems in the collection, such as "Park Avenue." Here the ghostly visitors seem to want to assuage their host's pain by offering unflinching acceptance—even though they share Arvio's preoccupation with unsettled human relationships and the psychic unrest they have assured her follows lovers to the grave. Longing and regret commingle here with the erotic charge that survives death.

The rift between the lovers in this poem is swift and violent and the memory of love in the face of subsequent loss deteriorates quickly. "What remained of the room and of the night, / the kiss or the argument that ensued." An anguished respect for the danger of uncontrolled emotion remains, too. "Why," the poet asks twice. "Did I forget why I left my home why?" The stylistics of the poem emphasize the question and the role memory plays in the mutability of perception. "Why" is rhymed twice with "eye" in this otherwise informally structured poem. At its first mention, "eye" is literal and specific. It refers to the eye of the narrator and its ice-blue reflection of the cold, hard anger she feels for her lover. At the second mention, the narrator's eye is vulnerable to the violence of a cocktail smashing the wall close by. By the last line, the "eye" becomes realized as a symbol for memory and its abstract function of capturing the time as it passes and before it completely dissolves. This cold anger has frozen memory until it is warmed by the poet's reflection, perhaps making it even more elusive until it is only a stain on the mind's eye.

Looking into her past, the spirits are voyeurs to this anguish and to the narrator's insecurities. "Did he recall the blue veins in my wrist / or only the ice-blue burn in my eye?" The poet wonders, in the end, what she was to her lover. Was she attractive, warm, sensual and beloved? Or will he only remember her as the angry shrew she was when he saw her last? The visitors are consoling, saying she is not different from them, even as they watch her from their supernatural perch. Her memories are inexact, the same as theirs. The narrator remains conflicted, but the voices continue to console, now with condescension. "'And do we want to remember?' one said."

One cannot really chose how to remember one's life, how to set it in the proper context based on externals. The quality of memory does not allow such assurances. "'Do you think you chose?'" the voices say. "'If only you could / determine your secret determinants.'" The narrator's sense of resignation that follows is the product of impasse. With supernatural authority, the voices have contributed to the narrator's understanding of two key points about the nature of memory—its resiliency, invulnerable even to death, and its deeply occult nature, unknowable even to the dead.

For the wisdom of these visitors to resonate, one must accept the use of metaphor with proper respect and recognize its descent from an honorable literary tradition. Critics view Visits from the Seventh and its supernatural conceit variously as the foundation of an odd and fanciful collection, an important advance in the poetics of transcendence, or a dangerous flirtation with banality. Judy Clarence of Library Journal makes almost deprecating note of Arvio's "flair for the supernatural" and credits her "prodigious talent" for rescuing her from the pitfalls of literary gimmick. Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, recognizes Arvio's sagely and sometimes wisecracking visitors as less magic and more the voices of "unuttered thoughts most of us have." Other publications giveVisits from the Seventh a lineage with more gravitas. A critic from the New Yorker, who is quoted in the paperback publication of Arvio's collection writes "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," an epic trilogy based on Merrill's transcriptions of Ouija board conversations with the poet's deceased friends, as well as Jesus, Plato, Nefertiti, Mercury, the nine muses and Michael the Archangel.

New York poet Richard Howard, quoted in the hardcover publication of Arvio's collection, seems to understand Arvio best, admiring the poems as "the most 'convincing' visitations since Merrill's Ouija-board transcriptions," but noting her possession by personal voices. "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," says Howard, writing for the hardcover edition book jacket. "She has forged her own dialogue of the dead…. I love hearing her persuasive voices; they are the woman herself."

Perhaps such a manifestation of Quaker Inner Light and psychoanalysis is a chorus of spiritual advisers, in place to speak to the mysteries of life that can be explained and to identify the ones that cannot. Arvio's invisible visitors are a conceit. The visitors admit as much in "Three Green Stars," which appears in the last few poems of Visits from the Seventh. "We were driving in the Jersey meadows / a gray purple sky, roving orange spots, / white clouds lit miasmic yellow. 'It might / be best,' one said, 'to call us a conceit.'" But their voices spring from Arvio's imagination, tilled by years of self-examination, and a cultivated receptivity to self revelation. Their inspired speech has been hidden until Arvio gave them form, like a costume to put on and take off. "Memory" is a poem about a woman talking to her wiser self.

Source: Lisa Trow, Critical Essay on "Memory," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Pamela Steed Hill

Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the following essay, Hill examines Arvio's poem as a mental battleground on which the speaker's desire to remember and desire to forget wage a war that neither can win.

What Do I Read Next?

In "Park Avenue," which also appears in Visits from the Seventh (2002), the poet describes a walk along the streets of New York, giving her invisible visitors the "intimate view" of the city they crave, and writing bits of their commentary down on scraps of paper.
In her poem, "Motherlessness," also from Visits from the Seventh (2002), Arvio describes "the hole in the skin of her soul" left by the loss of her mother.
Ezra Pound uses foreign words in The Cantos (1–109) (1964), a technique employed by Arvio in Visits from the Seventh.
"Ode to a Nightingale," by John Keats, from The Complete Poems (1988), offers a vehicle for poetic transcendence in the form of an unreachable bird.
Arvio's work has been compared to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), which is based on extensive transcriptions Merrill and his housemate David Jackson took from a Ouija board. The Changing Light at Sandover reports the messages of Merrill's deceased friends as well as mythic, historical, and literary figures such as Gertrude Stein, William Butler Yeats, Richard Wagner, Homer, Jesus, Mohammed and the angels Michael and Gabriel, as well as the nine muses.

Arvio's "Memory" is one of those poems that is better served by reading it within the context of the collection that includes it. The purpose of the visitors that come to Arvio as she writes is more substantiated when one can hear the full range of the strange little spirits' admonishments, encouragements, playful quips, and philosophizing in a variety of situations. That said, however, there is enough ammunition in this single poem to lay open the age-old struggle between one's inner-self and one's other inner-self, exposing the hapless attempts of an individual to recall the good and forget the bad.

In an interview by poetry editor Deborah Garrison for The Borzoi Reader Online, Arvio calls the poems in Visits from the Seventh "love poems to life; poems of longing for life." Growing up Quaker, she was taught not to "glorify an afterlife" but to "long for this life." Perhaps these revelations help clarify the opening line of "Memory": "'And do we remember our living lives?'" This line is supposedly spoken by one of the ghostly visitors, but the curious phrase "living lives" is the thing to note, no matter who says it.

While the noun "lives" may invoke countless adjectives to describe it, the word "living" is not typically one of them. It seems redundant. Her use of "lives" implies living. The need to define lives as living suggests that there are other types of lives, lives that may be forgotten or repressed. The latter is most poignantly addressed in this poem.

Each stanza presents a back-and-forth, tit-for-tat banter about fond memories and not-so-fond memories. In the first, the question regarding living lives establishes the central inquiry that the remainder of the poem tries to answer. The speaker is not sure whether she can recall the specific tangibles—"the clock or the door—" or intangibles—"the words 'I love you' or the word 'why'"—of a personal event in her life. One must assume that the episode involves a romantic relationship in trouble, since someone is leaving and someone is asking why. Memory is tricky here. The speaker may not remember an important declaration of love, but she does recall a "blue vein" in her wrist. She does not know, however, whether her lover recalls that part of her or "only the ice-blue burn" in her eye.

Each of these snippets of thought is a part of the living life of the speaker, but she cannot fully accept that they reflect her actual past. The implication is that they are factual recollections because there would be no reason to question the memory of a clock, a door, or a conversation if those things never existed. Even the slightest bit of doubt allows one to repress thoughts that are too painful to accept as fact. The battleground is established between what the speaker thinks she remembers and what she would prefer to question.

In the second stanza, the "room" and the "night" appear to be accepted, if not desired, memories, but then there is a quick switch to ambiguity when the speaker tries to decide whether "the kiss or the argument"—or both—occurred next. Kissing and arguing obviously connote two very different events in a relationship, although they may both certainly happen in the same setting. But juxtaposing a pleasant moment with an unpleasant one suggests an unsettling battle between good recollections and bad.

In The Borzoi Reader Online interview, Arvio says this about the imaginary beings that visit her when she writes "Their memory is stronger than mine, and their associative powers are stranger and more vivid." Interestingly, in the poem "Memory," one of her visitors remarks, "'You see, our memories are much like yours, / here a shadow, a sound, a shred, a wisp.'" The point is not so much the contradictory opinions about the speaker's versus the visitors' recall ability, but the fact that the idea of memory is an important presence in the struggle of the inner-selves.

Just as important are the words used to describe the memories of both the human and the spiritual visitors—shadowy, shredded, wispy. The uncertainty and incompleteness of memories make them easier to repress at will. However, as is clear in the poem, even those intentionally stifled have a way of creeping into an individual's mind when least expected or least desired. The italicized lines provide the best defense for the repression side. They answer the question, "'And do we want to remember?'" with a resounding, "'Never never'" and then proceed with an explanatory list: a "blurred wish" is better than a "fact half-forgotten," what people think they see is better than what they actually see, what people wish to feel is better than what they really feel, and so on.

The fourth stanza of "Memory" reveals a rather desperate attempt by the speaker to simplify the battle going on in her head. She confidently uses the phrase, "I choose to recall" only to be immediately admonished by a visitor who asks sarcastically, "'Do you think you choose?'" This is perhaps the most poignant indication that the war on her mental battleground is one that cannot be won. She is not in control of her "secret determinants," and if not she, then who?

The latter part of the poem provides the greatest evidence of why the speaker wages such a frustrating war of emotions within herself. Again, she asks a question that implies an irony—if she does not really "recall the cocktail as it smashed / against the wall there, so close to [her] eye," then why ask the question? The details are too specific to be a total figment of her imagination. On the one hand, she longs to forget that such a violent event ever occurred in her life and on the other hand she cannot help but remember it.

In the final stanza of "Memory," Arvio makes a subtle connection to the first stanza, in which the word "why" is suggestive of something bad about a relationship but not conclusive. It is not clear who is asking why in the first stanza, the speaker or her lover, but in the final one, it is clearly the speaker who ponders the question. Again, the query is rhetorical at best. Is it likely that one who leaves her home, her lover, and life as she knows it would actually forget why? No, but the implication is that her mind would like to forget. In reality, she cannot, and so the struggle continues in its back-and-forth cycle.

In spite of the confusion, the speaker cannot be blamed for wanting to forget the "full events" of what she calls "that terrible time." Attempting to repress the memory of unfortunate or tragic moments in one's life is a fairly common human endeavor. With the passage of time, the speaker believes her memory of the events surrounding the break-up of her relationship is "dissolving into the deep hues of dusk," but dissolving does not necessarily mean going away. It may mean simply changing form. In this case, the "essence" of past events are now left to the "inner eye," but is the inner eye still not a part of the person who is trying to forget?

Arvio ends the poem here, without fully disclosing what the speaker's "inner eye" really is. Most likely, it is that part of the human psyche that accepts the truth no matter how painful it may be. Think of it as a kind of receptor that keeps its feelers out for the true "essence" of all the events that happen in a human's lifetime. The inner eye never turns away sad or bitter memories of the worst events in spite of attempts by the rest of the mind to do just that. This inescapable dichotomy is the main fuel for the battle of emotions that rages within the speaker. She may placate one side for a while, but the other side always chimes in with thoughts she would prefer not to entertain.

Perhaps this is the reason for the visitors. They not only act as little alter egos of the speaker but also allow her to carry on mental conversations with herself when plain, simple thinking is not enough or when it provides undesirable results. Thoughts or memories of certain events in her "living" life lead only to despondency, so handing that chore off to imaginary friends alleviates the pain of a direct confrontation. In "Memory," the visitors admit that they "never" really want to remember, that they much prefer wishes to facts or what they long to see instead of what they really see. Yet they are able at least to address the painful truth when they must. This is not always the case for the speaker.

The speaker tends to use the visitors to keep a foothold in reality even though it is not a pleasant thing to do. While it is arguable that she may feel less emotional turmoil with a few less voices pop-ping in and out of her head, the questions, proclamations, and quirky suggestions made by the visitors prod her into staying focused. If she gave in wholly to her desire to forget, allowing this side of the inner-self war to win, one would have to consider what has really been won. Repression and avoidance will take their toll somewhere down the line. Let the battle continue, however, and the speaker herself endures.

Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on "Memory," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Ray Olson

In the following review, Olson praises Arvio's edgy sophistication.

Arvio's debut collection extrapolates entirely on a single conceit—that voices from a seventh sensual dimension counsel the poet in the wake of a long love affair. Like the unuttered thoughts most of us have, the voices remonstrate, sagely advise, philosophically expatiate, pooh-pooh, and wisecrack, but seemingly with greater objectivity than one's own thoughts could achieve. Perhaps the distress of falling out of love has clouded the poet's self-consciousness. Certainly, the first poem's first stanza bespeaks confusion about identity: "'but we're your one design,'" the voices say, "or 'you're our one design'—which was it?" As the poet recalls scenes from the affair and adjusts to her new reality, the poems sparkle with worldly-wise wit, including droll observations about sex, defensive rationalizing about abortion, recriminations against Mom for not comforting her lovelorn daughter, and considerations of the many ways that love relates to death. If Arvio's book lacks the brutal impact of Margaret Atwood's cycle of poems on a love affair, Power Politics (1971), it compensates gratifyingly with edgy sophistication.

Source: Ray Olson, Review of "Visits from the Seventh," in Booklist, Vol. 98, No. 11, February 1, 2002, p. 917.

Rob Neufeld

In the following review, Neufeld recalls being in high school with Arvio and calls the poems in "Visits from the Seventh" masterful.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Source: Rob Neufeld, "A Glimpse into the Making of a Poet," in Asheville Citizen-Times, March 22, 2002.

Sources

"Arvio, Sarah," in Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, September 11, 2003.

Arvio, Sarah, Visits from the Seventh: Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Clarence, Judy, Review of Visits from the Seventh, in Library Journal, Vol. 127, No. 5, March 15, 2002, p. 85.

Garrison, Deborah, Interview with Sarah Arvio, in The Borzoi Reader Online, at www.randomhouse.com (last accessed March 18, 2004).

Hirsch, Edward, "Poet's Choice," Review of Visits from the Seventh, in Washington Post Book World, June 9, 2002, p. 12.

Howard, Richard, in Visits from the Seventh, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Nadel, Alan, "Replacing the Waste Land—James Merrill's Quest for Transcendent Authority," in Modern American Poetry, at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/merrill/nadel.htm, (last accessed May 17, 2004).

Neufeld, Rob, "A Glimpse into the Making of a Poet," in the Asheville Citizen-Times, March 22, 2002, at cgi.citizen-times.com/cgi-bin/story/arts/9595 (last accessed May 18, 2004).

Olson, Ray, Review of Visits from the Seventh, in Booklist, Vol. 98, No. 11, February 1, 2002, p. 917.

Review of Visits from the Seventh, in Random House On-line Catalog, at http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?0375709789 (last accessed May 17, 2004).

Strand, Mark, in Visits from the Seventh, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, back cover.