Compass Rose

by Arthur Sze

2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist " Compass Rose [is] a collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our inter-connected world."—Pulitzer Prize finalist announcement [Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience—astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."— The New Yorker A child playing a game, tea leaves resting in a bowl, an abandoned dog, a foot sticking out from a funeral pyre, an Afghan farmer pausing as mortars fire at the in Arthur Sze's tenth book, the world spins on many points of reference, unfolding with full sensuous detail. Arthur Sze is the author of The Ginkgo Light (2009), Quipu (2005), and The Redshifting Web (1998). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 2014

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

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable if not always understandable.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Windows and Mirrors

Ladybug moving along a cast-iron chair —
translucent pink of a budding lotus
in the pond — you slide along
a botanical wall, recall someone
who stammered to avoid the army
and then could not undo his stutter.
A wasp lays eggs in a tarantula;
a gecko slips under the outdoor grill.
You bite into a deep-fried scorpion
on a skewer: when your father reached
for the inhaler, your mother
stopped breathing. Iridescent green
butterflies pinned to the wall —
a rainbow passing across an island —
striding past ants on a bougainvillea,
you find windows and mirrors
in the refractive index of time.
Tracks of clothes on the floor —
white plumeria on the grass —
hatched wasps consume the tarantula.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

sneaky good, accident calm

[Paul Haan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Came to this book by way of his more recent book, Sight Lines. While I liked the latter more, this was still an enjoyable read. I appreciated the Taoist drift and the juxtaposition of situations, from the typical to the tragic, the cultural to the natural. This is a collection of poems that can be revisited again and again with the reader bringing to them his or her current situation, never once being the same experience.

[Betty Winkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about Arthur Sze on a recent episode of Between the Covers. I was instantly intrigued by his attention to simple words like ‘as’. His poems were a comforting mix of tragic randomness and vivid descriptions of nature. I loved the forms of each of the poems and how they shifted and repeated.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A jarring, often unsettling work of poetry in which the poems often incorporate various perspectives, landscapes, and ideas. In many ways, the poems embody the fullness of life in all its varieties. Highly recommended.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars - juxtapositions spinning out with frequently beautiful imagery but sometimes even the lack of focus needs some kind of focus. Reads almost like found poetry? Another commenter thought it might just be a compatibility thing and I agree for me too.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to reread this each year of my life and find something new in Sze's poetry every time. There is so much here, and yet it's quiet, unassuming.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

These marvelous poems have remarkable qualities of distillation and juxtaposition. Light, limpid images and moments sit next to toxic and painful ones. Sze is a great composer.

[Alex Bilzerian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should have won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

[Kiera Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sze has earned his place as my favorite contemporary poet. This book is jaw-droppingly beautiful, wickedly funny, and startlingly crass.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second Sze collection I've come across and I'm kind of indifferent to both.

There are some great lines and juxtapositions here, but most of it seems like listing the mundane, while erratically throwing in the starflung.

When it's great, it's great, but when it's not, it really just feels like a bad short story.

Probably we're just not very compatible as writer/reader. I do think he's worth giving a shot, and this seems to have some acclaim, so you may as well pick it up.