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...