The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems

by Arthur Sze

Overview

**Winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award**

An affordable paperback edition of Arthur Sze's Collected Works—which includes many new poems—by one of the most astonishing poets writing today.

The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems, from National Book Award winner Arthur Sze. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions―employing startling juxtapositions that are always on target, deeply informed by concern for our endangered planet and troubled species―Sze presents experience in all its multiplicities, in singular book after book. This collection is an invitation to immerse in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556597060
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	08/13/2024
Pages:	552
Sales rank:	1,018,557
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.62(h) x (d)

About the Author

Arthur Sze (he/him) is an award-winning poet, translator, and editor who has published eleven books of original poetry. His works have been translated into fourteen languages, and include The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; and, Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His book of translations, The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (2001), was selected for the Western States Book Award. A recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, Sze has also been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and National Endowment of the Arts. A Chancellor Emeritus at the Academy of American Poets, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Read an Excerpt

Noah’s / Dove

The moon is black.

Had I a bird

it would fly,

beat the air into land. To remain

or trust

the silver leaves of the sea? What if

I say what is:

no bird, no land.

The sea tossing

its damp wet fish

on the bow,

their lungs exhaling

the sea, taking in

moon air

for the first time . . . 

Frost

Notice each windowpane has a different 

swirling pattern of frost etched on the glass.

And notice how slowly the sun melts

the glaze. It is indelible: a fossil of a fern,

or a coelacanth, or a derelict who 

rummages in his pockets and pulls out a few

apple cores. Notice the peculiar

angle of light in the slow shift of sunrise.

Where is the whir of the helicopter?

The search for escaped convicts in the city?

Be amazed at the shine and the wet. 

Simply to live is a joy.

Interviews

Excerpts from an interview with Adroit Journal:

“Poetry, for me, is language at its most intense, and I believe its concentrating power is uniquely suited to magnifying the resonance of surprising juxtapositions. In Sight Lines, I was interested in moving beyond the cultural parallax of differences between East and West and exploring a much larger, wider arena where incidents in varying space and time still exert influence or pressure on each other.”

“My poems are often in search of unexpected connections and have an underlying premise that things are often connected in ways we cannot readily see or anticipate… I’m fascinated by the relationship between the part and whole, micro and macro, where the part can be a specific poem, a line, a phrase, an image, something specific and finite.”

“I’m thinking of the title poem, “Sight Lines,” where, in process, I had forty or fifty one-lines and cut them out and moved them around on a table top and eventually stripped out lines that didn’t have enough force and let the lines settle into their shape. I think, in earlier books, I would have been content with creating a surprising juxtaposition in a single phrase or between a few fragments, but in this new work I gave myself room to expand this approach.”

“In “The Glass Constellation,” which took me nine months to write, the unstated structure is “Indra’s Net”... which says that all things that exist and occur are like pieces of glass hanging in an immense chandelier where light shines and each object reflects and absorbs every other. It’s the unspoken subtext that helped me write the poem. There are so many particulars that come and go, and, in the end, there’s the feeling that each event and object reflects and absorbs every other, so the poem becomes cosmological in scale.”

Editorial Reviews

Sze writes gracefully about both the cosmos and the natural world, mining vivid imagery that performs exactly what Ezra Pound wrote an image should embody, namely, ‘an emotional and intellectual complex in an instance of time.’ One poem segues into the next, moving from book to book with leaping, lyrical reportage that erases the speaker’s ego but not his presence. Each of his poems is a proverbial drop containing the whole of the ocean of his poetry.”—Harvard Review

“A new cornerstone of the Asian American poetic canon, Arthur Sze’s career-spanning book collects early adaptations of classical Chinese poetry, his signature terrain-traversing sequences, and new work written in lines like microscope slides, long and translucent, each one isolating a single clarified perception: ‘adjusting your breath to the seasonal rhythm of grasses— // gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, the Milky Way—.’”—The Boston Globe

“Sze is a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry, and Asian poetic and philosophical traditions. Image-based juxtaposition, openness to chance, ego-shattering and interrogative thought, remain central to this practice. The empirical and theoretical knowledge of the physical world, of which Sze has a remarkable range, enriches rather than competes with our emotional engagement… [W]ith full humility and wonder, the sense of the sublime does often arise, with its perplexing interplay of the minute and the vast, and its mixture of pleasure and terror, order and rupture.” —PN Review

“There is an immense silence, or the clearest crystal-toned ringing, that emanates from the nearly three hundred poems that comprise Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. This incandescent collection by one of our time’s most masterful poets is an invitation for us all to see ourselves, our lives, this earth, and one another in clear, attuned radiance” —The Georgia Review

“Arthur Sze offers a stellar collection of lyrical poems that captivate the reader’s heart … This is a volume I feel very fortunate to have encountered. I am living with it. You will want to as well.” —World Literature Today

From the Publisher

★ 03/01/2021

It is not easy to come to terms with a collection on this scale—it encompasses ten collections, plus new uncollected poems, and clocks in at over 500 pages—but if any living American poet merits the attention proper to a career retrospective, it is National Book Award-winning Sze (Institute of American Indian Arts, emeritus). A second-generation Chinese American, Sze has devoted particular attention to the aesthetics of Asian poetry, which he has fruitfully translated, and while his diction is comfortably contemporary, he has learned much from the dispassionate culture of the East: he sees in the now, and emotionalism does not interfere with his surprising conjunctions of vision and insight. Sze's approach has moved somewhat from lyric toward narrative, but the voice, and the quality, are consistent. There is much to treasure here, from the epigrammatic works of the 1970s ("Two ravens, lovers, discussed my death / as I watched") to the more discursive works of the past ten years. VERDICT A monumental collection from a poet whose lasting importance should now be recognized; essential for dedicated readers of contemporary American poetry.—Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

Library Journal