Compass Rose

by Arthur Sze

Overview

2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist

"Compass Rose [is] a collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our inter-connected world."—Pulitzer Prize finalist announcement

[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience—astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."—The New Yorker

A child playing a game, tea leaves resting in a bowl, an abandoned dog, a foot sticking out from a funeral pyre, an Afghan farmer pausing as mortars fire at the enemy: in Arthur Sze's tenth book, the world spins on many points of reference, unfolding with full sensuous detail.

Arthur Sze is the author of The Ginkgo Light (2009), Quipu (2005), and The Redshifting Web (1998). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556594670
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	07/01/2014
Pages:	68
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Arthur Sze has published eight books of original poetry, including The Ginkgo Light (2009), Quipu (2005), and The Redshifting Web, as well as one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon (2001). The Ginkgo Light was selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award. He is the recipient of many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a Howard Foundation fellowship, and grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. His poems have been translated into a dozen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, and Spanish. A second-generation Chinese American, Sze was born in New York City and currently resides in Sante Fe, New Mexico. He was the first poet laureate of Sante Fe (2006-2008) and is currently a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2012, he joined the Board of Chancellors at the Academy of American Poets.

Table of Contents

Black kites 3

After a New Moon 4

Sticking out 5

The Curvature of Earth 6

Beggingnear 12

Compass Rose 13

1 Arctic Circle 13

2 Fault Lines 15

3 Glimmer Train 16

4 Orchid Hour 17

5 The Curtain 18

6 2'33" 19

7 Comet Hyakutake 20

8 Morning Antlers 22

9 Compass Rose 23

10 Red Breath 24

In relief 26

Available Light 27

The Infinity Pool 34

Strike-Slip 35

She wrings 36

The Immediacy of Heat 37

At the Equinox 43

Returning to Northern New Mexico after a Trip to Asia 44

Qiviut 45

Backlit 46

An aura reader 47

Confetti 48

Spectral Hues 49

Windows and Mirrors Midnight Loon 51

Point-Blank 52

The Radius of Touch A cobra rises 54

The Unfolding Center 55

Acknowledgments 71

Notes 73

About the Author 75

Editorial Reviews

05/19/2014
Known for his ambitious and dazzling array of subject matter, Sze (The Gingko Light) exhibits a contemplative, image-based poetics in his ninth collection. Sze achieves a truly present tense in this book, weaving scenes of small, precise, and remarkably authentic actions throughout the poems, covering music, war, nuclear weapons, and comets, along with the “tiny spider” that “hangs a web between a fishing/ rod and a thermostat.” “Vietnamese, English, Hindi/ and Spanish ozone the air” that suffuses these lines, as does a plethora of other languages and places. In his commitment to recognizing the activity of the world around him, Sze creates pauses between his long poems and series with untitled, aerated fragments; short catalogues of immediate, disparate actions that hang in the moment: “Twitching before he plays a sarangi near the temple entrance, a blind man-” Never, not even in his more lyric, manic passages do we feel the poet giving in towards a typical, anxious post-modern voice. “In this world,” Sze insists, “we stare at a rotating needle// on a compass and locate / by closing our eyes.” Sze assures us, in fact, “ardor is here-/ and to the writer of fragments, each fragment is a whole.” (May)

Publishers Weekly

04/15/2014
In this latest volume from Sze (The Ginkgo Light), "the human mind/ moves from brightest bright to darkest dark." Using the trope of the compass rose, the nautical tool of navigation, these poems are directed by complex and multilayered meanings that find their source in crystalline imagery and insight. Deeply felt and meticulously wrought, Sze's words juxtapose science, myth, and the music of daily life to create an "immediacy of heat." Often, the "here and there dissolve," but locating ourselves in the world is important and necessary, even though we are at the mercy of life's randomness: "these are means// by which we live…nothing in sight/ in all directions;/ a rose flame under our skin." VERDICT It's easy for readers to become lost in the intricacies, but the beauty of image and symmetry of ideas offer balance and direction. [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/13.]—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal