Compass Rose

May 19, 2014
Known for his ambitious and dazzling array of subject matter, Sze (The Gingko Light) exhibits a contemplative, image-based poetics in his ninth collection. Sze achieves a truly present tense in this book, weaving scenes of small, precise, and remarkably authentic actions throughout the poems, covering music, war, nuclear weapons, and comets, along with the “tiny spider” that “hangs a web between a fishing/ rod and a thermostat.” “Vietnamese, English, Hindi/ and Spanish ozone the air” that suffuses these lines, as does a plethora of other languages and places. In his commitment to recognizing the activity of the world around him, Sze creates pauses between his long poems and series with untitled, aerated fragments; short catalogues of immediate, disparate actions that hang in the moment: “Twitching before he plays a sarangi near the temple entrance, a blind man-” Never, not even in his more lyric, manic passages do we feel the poet giving in towards a typical, anxious post-modern voice. “In this world,” Sze insists, “we stare at a rotating needle// on a compass and locate / by closing our eyes.” Sze assures us, in fact, “ardor is here-/ and to the writer of fragments, each fragment is a whole.”

April 15, 2014
In this latest volume from Sze ("The Ginkgo Light"), "the human mind/ moves from brightest bright to darkest dark." Using the trope of the compass rose, the nautical tool of navigation, these poems are directed by complex and multilayered meanings that find their source in crystalline imagery and insight. Deeply felt and meticulously wrought, Sze's words juxtapose science, myth, and the music of daily life to create an "immediacy of heat." Often, the ""here and there" dissolve," but locating ourselves in the world is important and necessary, even though we are at the mercy of life's randomness: "these are means// by which we live...nothing in sight/ in all directions;/ a rose flame under our skin." VERDICT It's easy for readers to become lost in the intricacies, but the beauty of image and symmetry of ideas offer balance and direction. [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/13.]--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

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