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Archipelago, Poems.
Poetry. "Arthur Sze composes an elegant, quietly intense, very human, beautiful poetry, one that is remarkable for its commitment to metaphor and musical language. I consider him one of the foremost poets of his generation. He is wise, intelligent, a joy to be with and read" -Quincy Troupe.
- GenresPoetry
85 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1995
About the author
Arthur Sze
38 books82 followersArthur 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 2, 2025
19 Oolong
‘Tea leaves wilted in sunlight are shaken
and bruised so that the edges redden
and veins turn transparent. A man at a counter
eats boiled silkworms and coughs;
a woman stops speaking and stares
at the constellation Perseus. Once,
a merchant smashed a black raku bowl
when it failed to please a teamaster,
but, glued back together, the black shards
had the texture of mulberry leaves.
You pass someone bowing talking on the telephone,
and the shock is an incandescent quark
leaving a spiraling track in the mind:
you sense how, in a field guide, it is impossible
to know the growth arc of a mushroom,
but stumble upon shelves of oysters
growing out of dead aspens and
see how nothing in this world is yet yours.’
45 ‘I sit and am an absorbing form’
‘Tea leaves wilted in sunlight are shaken
and bruised so that the edges redden
and veins turn transparent. A man at a counter
eats boiled silkworms and coughs;
a woman stops speaking and stares
at the constellation Perseus. Once,
a merchant smashed a black raku bowl
when it failed to please a teamaster,
but, glued back together, the black shards
had the texture of mulberry leaves.
You pass someone bowing talking on the telephone,
and the shock is an incandescent quark
leaving a spiraling track in the mind:
you sense how, in a field guide, it is impossible
to know the growth arc of a mushroom,
but stumble upon shelves of oysters
growing out of dead aspens and
see how nothing in this world is yet yours.’
45 ‘I sit and am an absorbing form’
August 22, 2026
Of the standalone poems, "Axolotl" and "mushroom hunting in the jemez mountains" are really fantastic; "slanting light" and "from the rooftop" are also quite nice. I think Sze's style is at its best - I will probably say this in every review - when the sequence of images and impressions align with just the slightest / briefest touch of explicit direction. There are one or two that are a bit too explicit ("shapes of leaves") and several that I wasn't able to bring together, including several sequenced poems. I did like the opening sequenced poem, "streamers," and I think the title poem really attains the full power of the style: each individual piece has flashes of insight in themselves as well as hints of the whole (the jar smashing, the parallel path) that only come into focus, satisfyingly, upon completion.
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February 10, 2017811.54 S9971a 1995
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews