The poems in Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation, which span 50 years of a singular luminous career, are a cosmos. What might it mean to exist as a human being in a particular moment in the intricate and interconnected webs of time and space is a quest and a question in poem after poem, from Sze’s earliest collection, The Willow Wind (1972), through the selection of new work, The White Orchard, that concludes the volume. Sze’s inimitable powers of lyric attention juxtapose / align / constellate / suture / draw sight- and dendritic- lines between and among the “entangled waves of near and far,” realms of sky and earth, epiphany and history, the personal and the political, finite and infinite, quotidian and sublime, until something essential to each is revealed, transformed. “Looping out into the world, we thread / and return,” Sze writes in “At the Equinox.” The closing couplet of “Rock Paper Scissors,” a recent poem, could be an expression of Sze’s poetic process and poetics: “how you look at a series of incidentals / and pull an invisible thread through them all.”
That “we yearn for connection where / no connection exists: what belt? What sword?,” as Sze puts it in “Ravine,” in which the speaker is gazing up at the constellation Orion, is a chief engine of these poems, which move fluidly across time and place, bringing into chordal concert what might at first seem like unrelated details from history, the back yard, sexual intimacy, the desert biome, archaeology, and so forth, but which, taken together, radiate with felt experience and the complexity of existence, as in “Sleepers” from The White Orchard:
A black-chinned hummingbird lands
on a metal wire and rests for five seconds;
for five seconds, a pianist lowers his head
and rests his hands on the keys;
a man bathes where irrigation water
forms a pool before it drains into the river;
a mechanic untwists a plug, and engine oil
drains into a bucket; for five seconds,
I smell peppermint through an open window,
recall where a wild leaf grazed your skin;
here touch comes before sight: holding you,
I recall, across a canal, the sounds of men
laying cuttlefish on ice at first light;
before first light, physical contact,
our hearts beating, patter of female rain
on the roof: as the hummingbird
whirs out of sight, the gears of a clock
mesh at varying speeds; we hear
a series of ostinato notes and are not tied
to our bodies’ weight on earth.
In many ways, this poem represents what one might call an Arthur Sze signature cocktail: in the shaker that is the poem, mix exquisitely sensory (often synesthetic) detail; things occurring in the same moment but in different places (the alighting hummingbird, the pianist hovering above the keyboard); images that subtly rhyme to reveal significant connections (the landing bird, like the pianist, suggests the thrumming mind of the poet and the incipient enactment of the poem itself, just as the purity of the irrigation pond pouring into the river depends on what the mechanic does with that motor oil); intimate, political, violent, natural, erotic, and historic instances, perceptions, often occurring at different times— corded together; and an expression of the mysteries of time, sexuality, and natural beauty that infuse human experience with meaning (“we hear / a series of ostinato notes and are not tied /to our bodies’ weight on earth”).
That this distinctive way of working is true across poems in no way diminishes the power of any single piece. For as with a wunderkammer or an archive or any interrelated series or simultaneous frisson, such as a musical chord, it is the quality and specificity and arrangement of the various parts brought together — the catalogue, the list, the various notes — that make something new, fresh, inimitable about each configuration. In fact, one way to engage with Sze’s substantial new and collected poems might be to read a poem a day as a kind of koan or text upon which to meditate — such is the richness of this precise, fiercely observant, metaphysical and elegant work.
What poet Joy Harjo writes in Secrets from the Center of the World, a marvelous book of Harjo’s meditations inspired by the photographs by astronomer Stephen Strom — “If all events are related, then what story does a volcano erupting in Hawaii, the birth of a woman’s second son near Gallup, and this shoulderbone of earth made of a mythic monster’s anger construct? Nearby a meteor crashes. Someone invents aerodynamics, makes wings. The answer is like rushing wind: simple faith” — could be a description of Sze’s own lifelong poetic sensibility as well. Sze wants to reveal rather than tell the “so what?” of such interpenetrating “stories,” stories often implied by a single brushstroke of description, whose significance, taken together, is not unlike Harjo’s “rushing wind: simple faith.” Here are the last lines of “Festina lente” (festina lente: “make haste slowly”):
I follow the tide of my breath
and, in the shoals of daylight,
begin to, festina lente, move,
as a series of concentric circles moves out, over the surface of water,
into a life that synaptically connects the shimmer of a leaf,
my hand in your hair, your hand
on my shoulder, an afternoon thunderstorm
gathering from the west,
as we situate at the brink of this wild-eyed world —
Of course one chief gift of a new and selected volume is the opportunity to trace a poet’s evolution over many books. The Glass Constellation opens with the “new” poems from an earlier new and collected volume, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1979 – 1998. After this suite of poems, The Glass Constellation proceeds in chronological order with selections from Sze’s ten earlier collections — again, a gift, as some of this work, especially The Willow Wind (1972), Two Ravens (1976), and Dazzled (1982), is now hard to find, in part because those texts appeared in small press, hand-crafted format as part of the Mimeo Revolution. It is a privilege to witness Sze moving through language and experience, even in the earliest Deep Image, compressed work, with the same eidetic brilliance that he will later extend into poems that risk a more expansive and complex reach.
Especially exciting to track is Sze’s meta-awareness of his poetic process and desires, the movement of the poet’s mind through space and time, and why that might matter. Here is the title poem from “Dazzled,” an early poem:
Reality
is like a contemporary string
quartet:
the first violinist puts on a crow’s head.
And the cellist
soliloquizes on a white lotus
in the rain.
The violin discusses
love, rage, and terror.
And the second violinist reports on the latest coup
in Afghanistan.
A gazelle leaps
in October light.
I am dazzled.
And here, in a poem written some 15 or so years later, is part 3 of “Six Persimmons,” from the new section of the Redshifting Web, enacting a similar poetics, but with an extended meditation on the role consciousness plays in its assemblage of contrapuntal details:
Green dragonflies hover over water. In the mind,
the axis of absence and presence resembles
a lunar eclipse. Hiking a ridge trail in the Barrancas,
we notice the translucent wing feathers of
a red-tailed hawk circling overhead. Once,
inadvertently, I glanced out the bathroom window
and noticed yellow yarrow blooming in sunshine.
A man does not have to gamble his car away
and hitchhike out of Las Vegas for the mind to ripen.
Bill Isaacs slices an agaricus lengthwise, points
to the yellow base of the stipe, says, “Xanthodermus.”
Although he has walked up a trail into spruce
and fir, mycelium in his hands has spread out.
Although asthma may be passed from one to another,
one mind may be a sieve, while the other may be
crystals growing up a string. Is sun to earth to moon
as mind to shiitake to knife? When one mind
passes to another, green dragonflies hover over water.
In the most recent poems, those from The White Orchard section of The Glass Constellation, Sze continues to ponder the role of sentience in comprehending and translating the prismatic and generative paradoxes of the world:
… no place is impoverished
if the mind sparks; if not, the dunes
of a Sahara have no end; the sun sets,
and a cooling range is under the stars —
when the mind seeds, a camel emerges
out of a dune and you ride it to an oasis,
where you imbibe ayahuasca: up all night,
when the man leading the vigil puts on
a jaguar mask and becomes a jaguar,
you raise your hands, and they spark butterflies.
(from “The Open Water, 4”)
Suffusing these most recent poems of interpenetrating perceptions is a fierce and moving questioning of the ethical, even moral, purpose and meaning of a lifetime spent, as Charles Wright would put it, “looking around,” of paying attention, specifically in poetry. The last poem in the book, “Transpirations,” ends this way:
… you ride the surge into summer —
smell of piñon crackling in the fireplace —
blued notes of a saxophone in the air —
not by sand running through an hourglass but by our bodies igniting —
passing in the form of vapors from a living body —
this world of orange sunlight and wildfire haze —
world of iron filings pulled toward magnetic south and north —
pool of quicksilver when you bend to tie your shoes —
standing, you well up with glistening eyes —
have you lived with utmost care? —
have you articulated emotions like the edges of leaves? —
adjusting your breath to the seasonal rhythm of grasses —
gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in the reflection, the Milky Way —
For over half a century, in poems that have earned Sze many of poetry’s most prestigious prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Chancellorship of the Academy of American Poets, and, most recently, the National Book Award, Arthur Sze has continually refreshed and deepened his generative poetic practice. In the title poem, Sze writes:
… You felt how a skin
separated you from death, how death
contoured the pause between exhale
and inhale, how it flowered inside
the bougainvillea blooming by a glass
door and sparked the white page
into light, and, as glass molecules
slow as the temperature cools
yet never lock into crystal patterns,
you feel how once never locks,
how it vibrates, quickens inside you …
Sze’s is a poetry that attends to and constellates the world’s wildly disparate and endless instances of “once.” The Glass Constellation is a beautiful and important testament to the significance of that endeavor, an important illumination in poetry’s cosmic vault.
[Published by Copper Canyon Press on April 13, 2021, 533 pages, $35.00 hardcover]