Copper Canyon Press | 2021 | 560 pages
In their definitive collection The Ecopoetry Anthology, Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street tell us that ecopoetry “enacts through language the manifold relationship between the human and the other-than-human world.” This is a good beginning to understanding what Arthur Sze is doing in The Glass Constellation, an astonishment of a book that collects new poems alongside ten previous volumes. It is a scintillant A-to-Z of this poet’s past five decades of work.
Sze is an ecopoet who pushes the traditions of classical Chinese poetry and deep image to what we might call “deep juxtaposition,” as in this passage from the multi-sectioned poem “Compass Rose”:
at a checkout counter, a clerk scans
an eight-pack of AA batteries, asks
if you’re playing Monopoly; no, no,
and tonight you’re lucky: you don’t need
a kidney transplant; no one angles a shiv
at your throat—a farmer hesitates
to pace a field before planting yams—
his father’s leg tore in a gunpowder burst—
along the riverbed, you spot a few beer
bottles and tire tracks but no elk carcass
in the brush: no snarling dogs leap out—
Orion pulses above the Sangre de Cristos—
and you plunge into highway darkness ahead.
If I were going to title this review, I might call it “The Safeway Clerk in the Stars.” There are plenty of poems by others about the natural world that seem to forget that the human animal is in the house, too. Here I refer to the etymology of ecology, coming as it does from the Greek word for “house.” But in Sze’s work, where the agency of other beings is always felt, we humans are also around doing what we do. Though others might prefer to describe Sze’s movement from “shiv” to “yams” as an associative leap (for it is), there’s a quality to the way he manages it and with such frequency that makes me keep coming back to “deep juxtaposition.” In conversation, a friend used the term “detonation” to describe the effect so often achieved.
Mary Oliver believed that “honey catches more flies than vinegar,” and that belief helped shape her gorgeous, transformative poems. In Sze, however, the honey is often tinctured with the vinegar: “We sip chai in a courtyard, inhale the aroma / of neem leaves laced with diesel exhaust.” This is another quality that reveals Sze as a true ecopoet. The shit is visible in the same field of view as the shine. A scenic view coincides with bullet holes through a yield sign, the heart-shaped leaves of spring grow alongside three-wheelers slashing ruts across the side of a ridge. The tragic is somehow intermingled with the marvelous: “while a veteran rummages through trash, / on Mars, a robot arm digs for ice—.”
In this way, and others, The Glass Constellation is a work of powerfully enacted interrelatedness: “As matsutake mycelium mantles the roots // of red pine, our cries enmesh each other.” This interrelatedness is signaled by Sze’s favored marks of punctuation. It’s rare to find periods in these poems (especially in the later work)—the dashes, colons, and semicolons which you are much more likely to see, of course, signal that what has come before is somehow involved in what follows.
But Sze doesn’t stop there; his poems push interrelationships to the extent that all the walls come down: “in an attosecond, here and there dissolve.” Just as now and then similarly dissolve, the distinction between time and space collapses: “in 1996, we saw Hyakutake through binoculars— / the ion tail contains the time we saw bats emerge out of a cavern at dusk—.” In these mergings, it is clear that Sze is also a poet of deep paradox. One moment the lines are all diverging and the next they converge. The infinite is in the finite and emptiness is in thingness:
Fireflies brighten the darkening air:
desire’s manifest here, here, and here’s
the infinite in the intervening emptiness.
Sze is simultaneously the microscope and telescope of the poetry world. And more. To truly attend to these poems is to begin to feel like you have been opened to a kaleidoscopic experience of the cosmos, a multisensual one whose kinetic foci gather moments across time and space, word and world. Take, for instance, this poem:
Comet Hyakutake
Comet Hyakutake’s tail stretches for 360 million miles—
in 1996, we saw Hyakutake through binoculars—
the ion tail contains the time we saw bats emerge out of a cavern at dusk—
in the cavern, we first heard stalactites dripping—
first silence, then reverberating sound—
our touch reverberates and makes a blossoming track—
a comet’s nucleus emits X-rays and leaves tracks—
two thousand miles away, you box up books and, in two days, will step
through the invisible rays of an airport scanner—
we write on invisible pages in an invisible book with invisible ink—
in nature’s infinite book, we read a few pages—
in the sky, we read the ion tracks from the orchard—
the apple orchard where blossoms unfold, where we unfold—
budding, the child who writes, “the puzzle comes to life”—
elated, puzzled, shocked, dismayed, confident, loving: minutes to an
hour—
a minute, a pinhole lens through which light passes—
Comet Hyakutake will not pass earth for another 100,000 years—
no matter, ardor is here—
and to the writer of fragments, each fragment is a whole—
There’s that paradox again in the last line. And here we hear something else going on. As intellectually rich as Sze’s poems are, they also sing with elegance. Listen again to this line—“a minute, a pinhole lens through which light passes—”—and this one—“no matter, ardor is here—.” This meshing of music and interrelationship is achieved in part because of this poem’s form. It is a cascade. It is, in fact, the first cascade to come into existence, which means that yes, Arthur Sze invented this form. In brief, the requirement to the form, written in one-line stanzas, is simply that each line picks up a word or words from the previous line. So instead of starting each line of a poem with, say, “here” (which would be an example of anaphora) the repetitions are more woven in and less predictable. The music cascades down the page. You might also say it stretches down the page like a comet’s tail.
A careful reader will detect at least a couple more cascades in The Glass Constellation (hint: there’s a section of new poems, The White Orchard). One of the variations of the form includes using the title, where the first line picks up a word or words from the title, and the title picks up a word from the very last line, so that the entire poem is a circle. This variation points to another way to think about the kaleidoscopic nature of these poems (etymologically, kaleidoscope means “beautiful form”). Instead of linearity and chronology, they enact circularity and simultaneity and likely reveal an influence from many Native American cultures in which time is experienced as something with no definite beginnings or endings, only what is, what always has been, and what always will be. For more information about the cascade and Sze’s process, I encourage you to read Eileen Tabios’s beautiful interview.
Maybe most of all The Glass Constellation reveals Sze to be a poet of deep consciousness. He adds to the genre of ecopoetry by exploring so thoroughly and consistently what is arguably the most amazing thing we are aware of: our own consciousness. Central to that exploration is our relationship to language: “As the character yi, change, is derived / from the skin of a chameleon, we are / living the briefest hues on the skin / of the world.” When Sze writes that “consciousness is an infinite net // in which each hanging jewel absorbs and reflects / every other,” he might as well be describing how the many free associations in his own collection have been so carefully crafted into a shining harmony. And that harmony embraces the mystery at the heart of being as an embodiment of Keats’s negative capability:
Sun Tzu wrote, musical notes are only
five in number but their melodies
are so numerous one cannot hear them all.
There’s such a place made for the ineffable, in fact, that in the subtlest way the door opens a sliver to the numinous. As these poems at times grapple with attachment, they often feel like they are pushing a materialist worldview into a spiritual one. Another way to think of it is that they are collapsing the distinction between the spiritual and the material, revealing the “spectral hues” limning everything, including the “nothing” in between (which must be something—dark matter?).
Surely part of this work overlaps with how wonder lives in these poems. We begin The Glass Constellation with “I gaze through a telescope at the Orion Nebula” and then plunge through the belly button of Earth—through so much life, so many individual lives (moments, places, times); through bones, television screens, peonies unfolding in a vase, napalm, breaths taken, divinations, breaths released, a car slamming into a snowbank, a herd of elk, thrown bowls of tea, a river fanning out in braids, a kiss on a lover’s neck, a luna moth—to find ourselves, 559 pages later, on the other side in the last line “gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, the Milky Way.” In this way, Sze redefines more common notions of ecological kinship.
What would Earth be like if more of us could let such wonder reside in our own interiority? How would we live if we knew the vast reaches inside us are the same ones we’ll find at the expanding edge of the comsos? Including Compass Rose, which was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize, and Sight Lines, which won the 2019 National Book Award, The Glass Constellation is a sublime and masterful embodiment of a kind of cosmic consciousness.
Read two poems by Arthur Sze, plus six poems (including five from The Glass Constellation), as well as our interview, “Charging the Through Line.”
Derek Sheffield’s collection Not for Luck was selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. His other books include Through the Second Skin, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, and Cascadia: A Field Guide through Art, Ecology, and Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023). His awards include the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee, a special mention in the 2016 Pushcart Anthology, and fellowships from Artist Trust and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. He is the poetry editor of Terrain.org and spends many of his off-screen hours in the woods or rivers along the eastern slopes of the Cascades near Leavenworth, Washington. Visit him at www.dereksheffield.com.
Read poetry by Derek Sheffield appearing in Terrain.org: Letter to America (with a translation into Spanish by Rhina P. Espaillat), two poems, and one poem.
Header photo by Hector Villalobos, courtesy Pixabay.
