The Ginkgo Light

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“Classically elegant.”—The New York Times Book Review

Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts." —Publishers Weekly

“Sze’s list-laden sequences capture the world’s manifold facts one by one, then through discursive commentary exact from them a sense not only of aesthetic order but of universal cause and effect.”—Boston Review

"Sze...here captures the energy of life in overshadowed daily events....His poems mine everything from geography, history, and biology to philosophy and nature, interweaving them to create a complex and luminous poetic texture....His poetry is an experience of awakening and pleasure that all serious students of contemporary poetry should have." —Library Journal

"Whether incorporating nature, philosophy, history, or science, Sze's poems are expansive. They unfold like the time-slowed cinematic recording of a flower's blooming...Sze has a refreshingly original sensibility and style, and he approaches writing like a collagist by joining disparate elements into a cohesive whole." —Booklist

A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and perseverance to transform the world’s factual darkness into precarious splendor. “Each hour teems,” Sze writes, as he ingeniously integrates the world’s miraculous and mundane—a woodpecker drilling a utility pole or a 1300-year-old lotus seed—into a moving, visionary journey.

Mayans charted Venus’s motion across the sky,
poured chocolate into jars and interred them
with the dead. A woman dips three bowls into
hair’s fur glaze, places them in a kiln, anticipates
removing them, red-hot, to a shelf to cool.
When samba melodies have dissipated into air,
when lights wrapped around a willow have vanished,
what pattern of shifting lines leads to Duration?

Arthur Sze, one of America’s leading poets, is the author of nine books of poetry and translation. He is professor emeritus of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and just completed a term as Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Sze's sparkling ninth collection is largely obsessed with people, animals, plants and planets, caught in moments that suggest (without exactly revealing) their place in a cosmic order. In the first poem, "a praying mantis on the floor sips water," "an ex-army officer turned critic frets," a welder watches an overpass, "teenage girls compare bra sizes," "light from a partial lunar eclipse/ diffuses down skylight walls"; in the last "Cottonwood leaves/ drift on the surface; a polar bear leaps off ice." In between, the images-as in the compound eye of a beautiful insect-add up to a persistent, even a single-minded, whole: Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts. At worst, the poetry looks like a set of lists, an interminable photo album; at best, as he says, "we lift and turn the incidents until... we find their true and living place." Sze (Quipu) weaves southwestern sights, Native lore, pre-Columbian peoples and languages, and East Asian poetry and thought throughout his verse, along with almost photographic reports on things seen: for him "Memory is encounter: each incident,// a bee thrumming in a hive." (June)

Library Journal

Sze, the author of nine poetry collections (e.g., Archipelago), here captures the energy of life in overshadowed daily events. The poet writes with filtering eyes sharp on the details that breathe new life into the mosaic of the poem. His poems mine everything from geography, history, and biology to philosophy and nature, interweaving them to create a complex and luminous poetic texture. His cinematic attention to the details reflects the Taoist influence in seeing and embracing life even in what appear as still and inanimated. Sze's poems are all about a journey of the senses to the outside, jolting with its objects and announcing them afresh and new: "As a musician lifts/ a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis/ hanging from branches above a moon doorway:/ a grandmother, once the youngest concubine/ propped in a chair with bandage around/ her knees." VERDICT Sze's declarative and fragmented lines in some poems, which might allude to the lack of connectedness, are, in fact, threaded through a central image that keeps the vividness of the poetic effect alive. His poetry is an experience of awaking and pleasure that all serious students of contemporary poetry should have.—Sadiq Alkoriji, South Regional Lib., Broward Cty., FL

—Sadiq Alkoriji

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781556592997
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication date: 6/1/2009
Pages: 96
Product dimensions: 6.08 (w) x 9.02 (h) x 0.24 (d)

Meet the Author

Arthur Sze is the author of nine books of poetry and translation. He is emeritus professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, former poet laureate of Santa Fe, and a corresponding editor for Manoa. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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The Ginkgo Light

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