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The Sybil of Rome Christopher Bakken Sono: Cantos Sarah Arvio Knopf http: //www.aaknopf.com 96 pages; cloth, $23.00 "What if I said the world was my ostrich, // When I'd hoped to say the world was my oyster. . .?" Sarah Arvio ponders in "Traveling," the opening poem of her second book, Sono: Cantos. Arvio's poems harness the exuberance that arises from linguistic accidents, dictionary pillaging, transliterated puns, the wit and "what if of associative blunders. Most of her cantos begin by proffering a word like "ostrich" (or a part of a word: one poem is built upon the scanty architecture of the letters "tr"), then blurring the edges of that word, its letters and its look and its sound, until it begins to dissolve. So "ostrich" becomes "ostracized," "ostracisim," and "oyster." And "trauma" melts into "trammeled," "tragedy," "tremoring," "trial," and "trailed." The aim of such disintegration is oddly constructive, as if words can be irritated so much they begin to shine: yes, sand in the meat of the oyster. And yes, sand in the meat of my own mind. I gathered around it and made my pearl, As pure as something made of grit can be. Arvio's poems proceed a little like the old game of "telephone": a phrase is whispered from ear to ear across the space of the poem until it emerges out the other end, mutated accidentally into something else. The pleasure of that game depends on the surprise of the finish, but also on the process of finding our way there, feeling the intimate brush of this stranger's lips upon our ears. There is an aspect of game-playing pertinent to the project of Sono, and therefore we get much of the silliness and flirtation we would expect: Fixable, it never was. I knew that. Or too late to fix by the time I knew. Fox hunting, a red fox lost in a fog. Field— fog—fuck. Oh love, was this fantasy. Vafan culo. As always, go get fucked, When, after all, that was what I wanted. Arvio's poems engage a kind of mental quickness and verbal dexterity—or ambidexterity—that we recognizees a performance of wit. We are delighted to view a mind in competition with itself, one that longs to surprise itself and us at every turn. Arvio's first book. Visits from the Seventh (2003), was built upon the premise that her poems were offered (or at least overseen) by imagined presences , "visitors" from beyond. For less imaginative poets, that trope would wear out almost immediately, but Arvio sustained an unstoppable chatter throughout . In Sono, a similarly obsessive trope generates the poems once again: not dictation this time, but a kind of divination through improvisation. The fortune being told is her own, of course. Thus a poem like "Renaissance" opens: "I meant I was and I had always been / the thing I was, though I wanted to be / another version of what being was." Arvio, a translator for the United Nations, wrote Sono while residing in Rome—clearly living in a kind ofinspired linguistic limbo. "Sono" is the Italian for "I am," and each poem is an effort at self-fashioning, at battening down the Protean, logo-maniacal, and irreverent being within her. The taxonomy of her occult practice is interesting to consider: this Sybil of Rome combines rhapsodomancy (divination through randomly selected verses) and haruspicy (the Etruscan practice ofreading the entrails ofbeasts). Arvio disembowels literary allusions and words and idiomatic phrases as they visit her, lets them sprawl upon the page in all their gory brightness, spelling out their own future as they travel associatively down the page. This is not as simple as just gutting the OED, or merely mucking around with pretty words. Yes, the peculiar wit of these poems arises partly out of linguistic accidents, but these accidents are powerfully determined into being by other forces. Arvio's music is clearly distorted, yet it hovers along the edge ofharmonies we recognize. While every poem permits the tongue to run amok, each is simultaneously confined by formal difficulties. These are games, but not games without rules: her hopscotch must be played within chalkscrawled boundaries determined...

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