The Ginkgo Light

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.

"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)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Classically elegant." The New York Times Book Review

"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

"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

"Sze's images and metaphors are fresh and dynamic, and again, the loose connections allow him to orchestrate a quotidian symphony." Rain Taxi

"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

Arthur Sze incorporates history and science, Native American and Asian perspectives, into a transformative vision.

A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he taught for twenty-two years, Arthur Sze was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe (2006-2008). He is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light (2009), Quipu (2005), The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (1998), Archipelago (1995), and one book of translations, The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (2001) from Copper Canyon Press. He is also the editor of Chinese Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2010).

Arthur is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, an Asian American Literary Award, a Western States Book Award for Translation, as well as grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.

His poems have been translated into Albanian, Bosnian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, and Turkish, and he has read his poetry at such international festivals as the XIX International Poetry Festival of Medellín (2009), the Delhi International Literary Festival (2008), the Yellow Mountain Poetry Festival in England (2008), the Yellow Mountain Poetry Festival in China (2007), the Pacific International Poetry Festival (Taiwan, 2008), Poetry International (Rotterdam, 2007), and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival (2002).