The Ginkgo Light

by Arthur Sze

“Classically elegant.”— The New York Times Book Review Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts." — Publishers Weekly “Sze’s list-laden sequences capture the world’s manifold facts one by one, then through discursive commentary exact from them a sense not only of aesthetic order but of universal cause and effect.”— Boston Review "Sze...here captures the energy of life in overshadowed daily events....His poems mine everything from geography, history, and biology to philosophy and nature, interweaving them to create a complex and luminous poetic texture....His poetry is an experience of awakening and pleasure that all serious students of contemporary poetry should have." — Library Journal "Whether incorporating nature, philosophy, history, or science, Sze's poems are expansive. They unfold like the time-slowed cinematic recording of a flower's blooming...Sze has a refreshingly original sensibility and style, and he approaches writing like a collagist by joining disparate elements into a cohesive whole." — Booklist A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and perseverance to transform the world’s factual darkness into precarious splendor. “Each hour teems,” Sze writes, as he ingeniously integrates the world’s miraculous and mundane—a woodpecker drilling a utility pole or a 1300-year-old lotus seed—into a moving, visionary journey. Mayans charted Venus’s motion across the sky,
poured chocolate into jars and interred them
with the dead. A woman dips three bowls into
hair’s fur glaze, places them in a kiln, anticipates
removing them, red-hot, to a shelf to cool.
When samba melodies have dissipated into air,
when lights wrapped around a willow have vanished,
what pattern of shifting lines leads to Duration? Arthur Sze , one of America’s leading poets, is the author of nine books of poetry and translation. He is professor emeritus of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and just completed a term as Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2009

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

[m. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The back cover described these poems as "list-laden," which is resoundingly true, but with rather a heavier emphasis on "laden" than I think was intended. I found this collection uneven -- the title poem sequence worked beautifully, I think, but too often the poems amounted to little more than very specific lists of plants and animals without much there there.

[sheng · Rating 5 out of 5]

pastoral & observational, yet introspective & lyrical! arthur sze walks these fine lines so well and continues to impress me with poetry collections where the individual works and sections stand strongly alone but piece together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. i love ginkgos and poems about the natural world so this collection was easy to love and will be special to me forever. "the double helix" was my fave poem and probably the strongest one in the collection. dichotomous venation.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Umiak, agaric, stridulate, venation, tesselate, stipe, glaucous, skyhop, trigram, anneal, tenon. These are some of the words I had to look up while reading this incredible poetry collection -- something I look forward to when reading Sze.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book. The final series of poems, "Another Direction," is profound and incredible. I'd love to teach it soon!

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5) Well that's just bloody lovely!

[Kiera Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite collection/book I've read in 2023

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Looking for something on World Cat, Arthur Sze's poetry book was included among the results. Never having heard of him and having a copy of The Ginkgo Light in the library, I was surprised to find what extraordinary poems he writes. There's lots of supplemental material about his poems on the internet. I learned about the fossil plant Ginkgo, from seeds that could still be planted and thrive. The image of the thriving, persevering ginkgo (biloba) applies to the celebration of life--living, disappearing, resurgent light/life. This poet is extraordinarily detailed in his portraits, is prone to juxtaposing disparate images which nevertheless become part of this living scenario. No subject in nature escapes his pen; everything on earth, in sky, and under sea is in these poems, even surviving evidence of disappeared cultures come into being again. These poems gave me many hours of enjoyment.

[Richard Magahiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sze's style is to crowd image upon image, the showy and the modest, natural phenomena and human drama, packing them in so tightly that the reader is almost dazzled by the abrupt shifts. In this way he says something about the variety of existence on earth. It is at a pole apart from confessional poetry, with the author's voice kept detached from the subjects being discussed, which makes the reader think more in terms of editorial choices which went into the poetic collage. I think someone who goes in with an expectation of a single message carried by a particular poem will be disappointed, whereas one who takes the time to feel each finely detailed element and consider how it fits or conflicts with its neighbors might have a better appreciation of what the poet intends.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arthur Sze's poems describe people, animals, and plants in varying states of motion and decay. The poems hinge on sudden pivots and contrasts: jumping from animals to humans, from a human activity to natural phenomena. The juxtapositions of the natural and manmade worlds are often ingenious. It's clear that Sze has impermanence on his mind, as well as drawing out connections between the Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and Western United States landscapes which he seems to know so well. Yet the abstract nature of most of these poems makes their ultimate meaning illusive. I can see that the poems are about impermanence and life cycles, yet I cannot discern what the poems are telling me about impermanence and life cycles.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeah baby! This one ruled!

[Edward Rathke]

Read this today and I find myself oddly indifferent, which is something poetry has never really made me feel before.

Some great images, some great lines, but it didn't move me. I sort of don't know what to say about it, so I've decided not to rate it, because any rating would be sort of meaningless.

The poems are focused on normal events, the mundane, and packed with images, but I guess it just never came together in my head.

Maybe it will for you. It's worth checking out.

[Siel Ju · Rating 2 out of 5]

Described crudely, poems about mortality and survival and cycles of life, with most metaphors drawn from nature -- animals and plants and fish, most presumably native to Santa Fe, where Arthur's lives, retired. Some poems composed of elliptical lines are interesting -- others not so much ("Meandering across a field with wild asparagus....").

[Mike Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I admire most in Sze's poetry is how each individual moment in each poem seems to collage in the piece as a whole without need for transition. Sze works great in short and long form poetry, while adding voice to topics rarely discussed, including (but not limited to) life on a America's reservations and life after the atomic bomb. Sze gives his readers a clear and intelligent voice to hold.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sze writes an interesting combination of Southwest Native American, Chinese and other world cultures all mixed together. Some poems are easier than others. He is worth the trouble.

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful imagery and poignant metaphor throughout Sze's poetry. Astute observations of nature and how human life mimics the aesthetic order of things.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

One who sees the immensity in the daily; the gentleness of being in a stormy universe.

[Mary McCray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good mix of East meets West.