The Redshifting Web: New & Selected Poems

by Arthur Sze

This collection spans more than a quarter century of published work, including selections from five previous award-winning books, and makes available for the first time the full range of Sze's remarkable poetry. Through the startling juxtaposition of images, Sze reveals the interconnectedness, the interdependency of things and ideas, always with an ear attuned to pitch and cadence.

Genres: Poetry, Asian American

250 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 1998

About the author

Arthur Sze (b. 1950 New York City) is a second-generation Chinese American poet.

Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.

He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.

He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admire Sze's work with form and what his poems are able to contain. Chaos theory meets Buddhism meets evocative language, crisp images, everything at once. A sense that everything is connected and simultaneous.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sze's poetry can seem effortless, but he demands a lot from his reader: Sze's work is packed with historical references, cultures he encounters on his travels, and juxtaposition that demand more careful attention than the ease of his language indicates. He almost always embeds his observations in the flora and fauna of the natural world and seemingly contrasts that with daily life--this latter trick he overuses at points as it implies a harmony of life that isn't argued for, but the poetry still works in its subtly and contrast on a level many poets don't even attempt. This collection covers a great range of his poetry for the 28 years at the end of the 20th century. Very little of it ages particularly as the contrasts and images are fresh and the idiosyncrasies are not particularly time specific. Sze is now a favorite of mind.

[Tracy O · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't for everyone. He really likes to juxtapose situations and meanings, and in general, it's totally cool, but I don't think it's for everyone. Start with the poems from River, River which are just great.

From The Unnamable River 2

In a crude theory of perception, the apple you
see is supposed to be a copy of the actual apple,
but who can step out of his body to compare the two?
Who can step out of his life and feel
the Milky Way flow out of his hands?

An unpicked apple dies on a branch;
that is all we know of it.
It turns black and hard, a corpse on the Ganges.
Then go ahead and map out three thousand miles of the Yangtze;
walk each inch, feel its surge and
flow as your feel the surge and flow in your own body.

Add the spinning cone of a precessing top
is a form of existence that gathers and spins death and life into one.
It is in the duration of words, but beyond words -
river river river river, river river.
The coal miner may not know he has it.
The railroad engineer may not know he has it.
But it is there. It is in the smell
of an avocado blossom, and in the true passion of a kiss.

[Maura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep picking this collection up again after having finished it. Has that kind of power, in my estimation.

[David Massey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe Arthur Sze is the greatest poet of my generation. The book The Redshifting Web is a kaleidoscope of joys, loss, pain, grief, recovery, redemption, all the things of a fully open and transparent life. Even short poems like “The Diamond Point” resonate with life lived. A poem of joy followed by pain, loss, grief, the joy and pain of remembering moments of lived life with his beloved: “1947, 1960, 1967, 1972, 1981. / A firework explodes in a purple chrysanthemum.” This flower, symbol of happiness, joy but also of death, grief. “ooh and aah, and then, then/ use the diamond point of grief: / incise a clear hibiscus in the windowpane.” What can be harder than diamond? What can be harder than grief? A clear hibiscus: symbol of recovery, redemption, life. A plant that makes a tea excellent for prevention of cancer and other diseases, but a symbol also of redemption—the Rose of Sharon hibiscus, symbol of Christ, of something beyond. Incise it in a windowpane: a window gives access to what is beyond, life after this life is no more. A beautiful poem. Beauty permeates this book. “Streamers” and “The Redshifting Web” are in my judgement two of the greatest of modern poems. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would give it my highest plaudits.

[Wuttipol✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Chance

The blue-black mountains are etched
with ice. I drive south in fading light.
The lights of my car set out before
me, and disappear before my very eyes.
And as I approach thirty, the distances
are shorter than I guess? The mind
travels at the speed of light. But for
how many people are the passions
ironwood, ironwood that hardens and hardens?
Take the ex-musician, insurance salesman,
who sells himself a policy on his own life;
or the magician who has himself locked
in a chest and thrown into the sea,
only to discover he is caught in his own chains.
I want a passion that grows and grows.
To feel, think, act, and be defined
by your actions, thoughts, feelings.
As in the bones of a hand in an X-ray,
I want the clear white light to work
against the fuzzy blurred edges of the darkness:
even if the darkness precedes and follows
us, we have a chance, briefly, to shine.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nature, accident, emptiness, vastness collide in shattered moments, finding a letter in the stars or watching war correspondence or dancing with a sunflower bending to the light. Real growth over this collection, unsteady in the '70s and engrossed by the '90s.

[Alex Bilzerian · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ 1054, a supernova.”

[Kathy Piselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems remind me of fat globs of paint on a canvas. I don't always understand how the words connect, but just looking at them is very satisfying. "Deltoid spurge, / red wolf, / ocelot, / green-blossom pearlymussel" for one example. For another: "Here skid marks on I-25 mark a head-on collision; / here I folded an origami crane; / here a man writes in grass style: huan wo he shan; / here black poplar leaves swayed on the surface of clearest water; / here a downy woodpecker drills high in the elm..." Vignettes from a poet's head. Favorite is Noah's/Dove: "The moon is black. / Had I a bird / it would fly, / beat the air into land. / To remain / or trust / the silver leaves of the sea? / What if / I saw what is: / no bird, no land. / The sea tossing / its damp wet fish / on the bow, / their lungs exhaling / the sea, taking in / moon air / for the first time..."

[Dolorous Haze · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sze can be a fascinating curator of words, like in "The String Diamond" where he simply lists extinct species. He makes earthly flora and fauna sound like the lost incantations of a mystical civilization. Once you read more than five of his poems, though, you notice a particular gimmick he's been wearing out for 30 years. Here's an example I found on the very second poem I picked at random:

"A neighbor
rejects chemotherapy and the hospital;
and, instead, writes
a farewell letter to all her friends
before she dies.

I look at a wasp nest;
and, in the maze of hexagons,
find a few
white eggs, translucent, traveling formed wasps,
but wasps never to be born."

These jump-cuts from one moment to the next almost always serve the same purpose. To emphasize the oneness of life; even seemingly opposing phenomenons are part of the same web of life. To juxtapose obscenity with beauty or cruelty with serenity. While sometimes effective on its own, the trick gets tiresome quick after reading 10-20 of Sze's poems in a row.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

When the poems work they are very good. Often for me they don't work. Clearly a skilled practitioner of the art. Some poems have too many private references, or seem like wonderful phrases strung together. Others are bright clear jewels.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 S9971r 1998