Athar C. Pavis
Athar C. Pavis is an American poet who grew up in Brooklyn. She studied Provençal poetry at Mount Holyoke College and at the Institut d’Etudes Provençales in Paris. She later did research on Proust, attended the Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris, and taught at the Sorbonne and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, commonly known as the Quai d’Orsay. She has published poems in Britain and Canada and in U.S. magazines, in Five Points, The Lyric, Slant, Chariton Review, Able Muse Review, The Alabama Literary Review, Trinacria, The Orchards Review, and The Comstock Review, among others. PULLED PORK IN PARIS, her first poetry collection, is published by Kelsay Books, Inc. She is currently working on a hybrid novel based on what happens when a team of language teachers comes up against French hierarchy at the Quai d’Orsay.
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Athar C. Pavis gives us a beautiful, authentic and moody immersion in Paris, the Paris I remember from years ago— foreign, kind and without tourists. To hope, she writes, is a Parisian sky/ lifting the gaze to see/ horizons vaster than the eye/ encompasses. This collection is like visiting the author to experience a personal understanding, small moments of dwelling with a sharp-eyed resident. The poems are intimate and rich and you will find yourself there in Paris, line by line,
the city of lovers, learning personal wisdoms: Never marry a man without meeting his father. You will yearn to share a second life/ made possible in me. Take an evening walk and love the bells of Notre Dame/
sounding the evening hour,/ twilight rose-tinted on the stone,/ochre on alabaster. I recommend this unique and delightful collection.
—Peggy Miller, poet, Editor with Comstock Review
Pulled Pork in Paris is a saucy title for a collection of truly excellent poems. Athar C. Pavis has put together an intricate mosaic of her best work from many journals— work that touches on personal relationships, interaction in the workplace, deep psychological perception, brutally honest reflections about aging, and (in a very pointed way) the contrariness of the American temperament in a maddeningly French milieu. Pavis also raises questions about aesthetic practice, and whether the balm of poetry can fill the void of life’s disappointments. Most of the poems here are short, but some are extended accounts of complex argumentation on issues of cultural and political conflict. Above all else, Pavis remains the voice of sanity and intelligence in all situations, whether public or private. This is a book of quiet poetry, but it is not reticent. Athar C. Pavis has much to say, and insists on being heard.
—Joseph S. Salemi, poet, Editor of Trinacria
When reading these marvelous poems, I am often reminded of Ruskin’s maxim: Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. Athar C. Pavis is a poet for whom the disciplined observation of the things around her is intensified into a kind of moral urgency. Her poems free us from the blinding simulacra that tempt us at every turn.
—William Thompson, poet, Editor of the Alabama Literary Review