The Ginkgo Light

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

Publishers Weekly

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)

Arthur Sze is the author of nine books of poetry and translation. He is emeritus professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, former poet laureate of Santa Fe, and a corresponding editor for Manoa. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.