VISITS FROM THE SEVENTH

Arvio's debut collection charts a series of visitations by a gaggle of spectral spirits, whose chattering presence our "extra-sensed" speaker invokes "often, in lieu of human contact." Arvio's sprites eschew the larger metaphysical and historical concerns of James Merrill's Ephraim et al. for the wryly personal and domestic: love, memory, desire, "your plight, your purpose, your oh/ so necessary struggles and strivings." They verbalize through the pen the speaker carries with her at all times to channel her "seventh sense" ("the sixth is sex, silly"), which allows her to tell a story of love, loss and the flickers that remain: "a vast web of eventualities/ traced negative of the verso of life:/ verging, converging and parting again,// or radiating from a single verb,/ never ever to return or meet," as one voice puts it. While this metaphor for a loss so great the speaker retreats into her own mind and projects her internal voices outward is a powerful one, Arvio's spirits sound like rattling aristocrats; their speech sprinkled with "darling" and "love" and such exclamations as "we covet water though which light will ride/ and you, my dear." Such portentous oratory often gives way to elaborate word games in which the ever-more-demanding and indistinguishable ghostly voices spin out puns and associative jokes, which finally can't hold the poems together. Still, readers may be content to stroll along for the view while the speaker tries to maintain "a light happiness, a levity,/ empty and sweet and pleased to be alive,/ a walk a day along Park Avenue." (Feb. 20)

Forecast:A "Knopf Q&A" between Arvio and Knopf editor Deborah Garrison, contained in the publicity packet, begins with the fact that Arvio is in her (late) 40s, significant for a first-book author. Look for short magazine profiles that use late blooming, along with Arvio's day job as a United Nations translator, as hooks.