The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems
Arthur Sze
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems
Arthur Sze
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
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.
Arthur Sze offers a stellar collection of lyrical poems that captivate the reader’s heart, even as the personae involved in the individual works also seem affected, sometimes dramatically, sometimes more subtly, but always moved. These poems are full of energy, sometimes boiling below the surface, or recoiling in a desert sunset, but always linking heart and mind with sensation and intellect.
Delight, Parnassians. Arthur Sze has returned.
This overflowing trove presents the evolution of Sze’s writing, tracking the germination of his language and the blooming of his style, the accumulation of his diverse interests and techniques, and his distinctive ebb and flow between the moments of bafflement and of epiphany. The experience of parsing through The Glass Constellation in its entirety left me in a state that was nothing short of astonishment.
The universe, in its expansions and contractions, seems wholly contained in The Glass Constellation, Arthur Sze’s eleventh collection of poetry, which gathers, along with his newest poems, the entirety of his previous ten books. Yet Sze’s poetry, as a poetry of paradox, is the opposite of containment—it is, as the universe is, an ever-expanding web.
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.