What is the author's style in Memory by Sarah Arvio?

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.