Poetry review – INTO THE HUSH: Charles Rammelkamp delights in the small appreciative details among Arthur Sze’s observations of the universe
Into the Hush
Arthur Sze
Copper Canyon Press, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-55659-714-5
$23.00, 88 pages
In the poem, “Swimming Laps,” the speaker is doing a backstroke just before dawn and sees Mars and Venus in the sky; he then asks, ‘how is it a glimmering moment coalesces, and the rest slides like flour through a sieve?’ Arthur Sze’s poems are filled with such ‘glimmering moments’ as he contemplates the world and his own existence. They are moments to be cherished, as he goes on to say later in the poem: ‘let each day be lived risking feeling loving alive to ivy reddening along the fence—’ Sze is a great “noticer.” He sees the shocking and horrible alongside the sublime and beautiful, the magnificent and the mundane, which are frequently the very same thing.
With a mystic’s sense of the interconnectedness of the universe, Sze joins disparate realities with these poetic bonds of sight and being. ‘The smallest // subatomic particles trace / the birth of the cosmos,’ he writes in part six (“Wildfire Season”) of his nine-part poem, “Forage.” In the fifth part, “Floaters,” this connection and style are on full display.
Driving past a phalanx of white tombstones
along a south-facing slope,
I recall, “No one hates war like soldiers,”
from a mechanic replacing
an oil pump in a Fiat engine, then another floater
appears when I blink—
peach blossoms on flowing water go
into the distance—
and as I ponder how a line written in 740
stays present tense—
a curve-billed thrasher nests in a cleft of spined cholla—
a man, on ayahuasca,
types with his hands, and his hands disappear;
he types with his hands,
and his hands disappear—shimmer the words
as his hands disappear.
The italicized lines belong to Li Bai, the Tang Dynasty poet. Here is Sze effortlessly linking him to the tombstones, the mechanic, the Fiat, the curve-billed thrasher, the man hallucinating on ayahuasca, in a poetic logic whose simplicity rings true with a yogi’s insight.
In the title poem, he writes, ‘When you’ve / worked this long, your art is no longer art / but a wand that wakes your eyes to what is.’ The awakening.
“The Hush” may be this very moment of epiphany, a kind of satori experience of ‘awakening’: ‘out of the blue of a robin’s eggs,’ he begins the sixth part of “Into the Hush,” and a dozen lines later:
to the radiating joy grief despair hope love that makes us human—
to the patter of rain on the roof before sunrise—
to daylight that is daylight—
to the hush that is now—
How better to describe “enlightenment” than with these images of radiating joy, sunrise, daylight? The hush that is now.
Arthur Sze deftly employs a variety of poetic forms to further his vision. In addition to several complex, multi-part poems – “Spring View,” “Into the Hush,” “Forage,” “Architecture of Emptiness,” and “Pe’ahi Light,” a poem located on Maui (‘bloom / through lifetimes within a single lifetime’) – Into the Hush features the haibun “Drought,” a form that combines prose and haiku, and a handful of zuihitsu, another ancient Japanese form that combines poetry and essays. The word “zuihitsu” translates to ‘following the brush.’ One of about half a dozen in the collection reads:
Full moon. Dogs barking, racing up and down the glassed-in hallway. Xenon,
krypton, argon, neon, helium. Inert gases. Blue bottles on branches. Nothing’s
inert. Where am I?
Moving the brush in the air, we made another downward stroke, then,
releasing pressure, brought it up. I drew a breath—
Many of Sze’s poem’s end this way, without concluding punctuation, lines continued with a dash or a colon, as if the thought goes on and on….The poem “Dawn Branches” ends on the line, ‘branches of a golden rain tree emerge out of darkness—’ So many of the poems in Into the Hush take place at dawn or dusk, highlighting the theme, or image, of “enlightenment.” Part 5 of “Into the Hush” similarly concludes with a colon: ‘in spring I want / to take on the contours of spring before stepping out:’ “Rio Chamita,” set in New Mexico, ends:
while water runs into this pond, before it spills
over a metal gate into the Rio Chamita,
we gather our lives in this pooling—
The abruptness of the ending paradoxically seems to signal the very endlessness of being.
In addition to thought-provoking poems written from the perspectives of a Jaguar and of an eraser, Into the Hush includes a couple of pantoums, the braided-line form originally invented in Malaysia. One is titled “Papyrus Pantoum” and the other “Shadows of Flames,” which is another poem based on images of light. It similarly ends on a dash:
quicksilver lightning, peony moon, this kiss;
juniper crackles and piñon smoke scents the room—
“Leafless,” set during the last hour of the winter solstice, is likewise concerned with light and all that that implies. This short, seventeen-line poem begins, ‘Sunlight strikes the leafless aspen branches,’ and it ends
when we stop, the eagle feather
of this pauses blesses. Before light
of the shortest day lifts to the hills,
it runs across my line of sight in widening gold.
Arthur Sze’s poems include images of cruelty and extinction – species and languages disappearing, real and incipient violence – but the effect of Into the Hush is a sort of contemplative appreciation of the universe of being, in its small details (‘Mist veils the apricot branches and trunks—’ the poem “Morning Mist” begins) as well as in its cohesion, its connectedness. As the final poem of Into the Hush, “Pe’ahi Light,” concludes:
as I strive to make a poem that scintillates
in the dark, scintillates in the dark,
we do not stagger, zombie-zapped,
but spark in our bodies glistening in misting rain.
Glimmering moments, indeed.
Feb 13 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Arthur Sze
Poetry review – INTO THE HUSH: Charles Rammelkamp delights in the small appreciative details among Arthur Sze’s observations of the universe
In the poem, “Swimming Laps,” the speaker is doing a backstroke just before dawn and sees Mars and Venus in the sky; he then asks, ‘how is it a glimmering moment coalesces, and the rest slides like flour through a sieve?’ Arthur Sze’s poems are filled with such ‘glimmering moments’ as he contemplates the world and his own existence. They are moments to be cherished, as he goes on to say later in the poem: ‘let each day be lived risking feeling loving alive to ivy reddening along the fence—’ Sze is a great “noticer.” He sees the shocking and horrible alongside the sublime and beautiful, the magnificent and the mundane, which are frequently the very same thing.
With a mystic’s sense of the interconnectedness of the universe, Sze joins disparate realities with these poetic bonds of sight and being. ‘The smallest // subatomic particles trace / the birth of the cosmos,’ he writes in part six (“Wildfire Season”) of his nine-part poem, “Forage.” In the fifth part, “Floaters,” this connection and style are on full display.
The italicized lines belong to Li Bai, the Tang Dynasty poet. Here is Sze effortlessly linking him to the tombstones, the mechanic, the Fiat, the curve-billed thrasher, the man hallucinating on ayahuasca, in a poetic logic whose simplicity rings true with a yogi’s insight.
In the title poem, he writes, ‘When you’ve / worked this long, your art is no longer art / but a wand that wakes your eyes to what is.’ The awakening.
“The Hush” may be this very moment of epiphany, a kind of satori experience of ‘awakening’: ‘out of the blue of a robin’s eggs,’ he begins the sixth part of “Into the Hush,” and a dozen lines later:
How better to describe “enlightenment” than with these images of radiating joy, sunrise, daylight? The hush that is now.
Arthur Sze deftly employs a variety of poetic forms to further his vision. In addition to several complex, multi-part poems – “Spring View,” “Into the Hush,” “Forage,” “Architecture of Emptiness,” and “Pe’ahi Light,” a poem located on Maui (‘bloom / through lifetimes within a single lifetime’) – Into the Hush features the haibun “Drought,” a form that combines prose and haiku, and a handful of zuihitsu, another ancient Japanese form that combines poetry and essays. The word “zuihitsu” translates to ‘following the brush.’ One of about half a dozen in the collection reads:
Many of Sze’s poem’s end this way, without concluding punctuation, lines continued with a dash or a colon, as if the thought goes on and on….The poem “Dawn Branches” ends on the line, ‘branches of a golden rain tree emerge out of darkness—’ So many of the poems in Into the Hush take place at dawn or dusk, highlighting the theme, or image, of “enlightenment.” Part 5 of “Into the Hush” similarly concludes with a colon: ‘in spring I want / to take on the contours of spring before stepping out:’ “Rio Chamita,” set in New Mexico, ends:
The abruptness of the ending paradoxically seems to signal the very endlessness of being.
In addition to thought-provoking poems written from the perspectives of a Jaguar and of an eraser, Into the Hush includes a couple of pantoums, the braided-line form originally invented in Malaysia. One is titled “Papyrus Pantoum” and the other “Shadows of Flames,” which is another poem based on images of light. It similarly ends on a dash:
quicksilver lightning, peony moon, this kiss; juniper crackles and piñon smoke scents the room—“Leafless,” set during the last hour of the winter solstice, is likewise concerned with light and all that that implies. This short, seventeen-line poem begins, ‘Sunlight strikes the leafless aspen branches,’ and it ends
when we stop, the eagle feather of this pauses blesses. Before light of the shortest day lifts to the hills, it runs across my line of sight in widening gold.Arthur Sze’s poems include images of cruelty and extinction – species and languages disappearing, real and incipient violence – but the effect of Into the Hush is a sort of contemplative appreciation of the universe of being, in its small details (‘Mist veils the apricot branches and trunks—’ the poem “Morning Mist” begins) as well as in its cohesion, its connectedness. As the final poem of Into the Hush, “Pe’ahi Light,” concludes:
as I strive to make a poem that scintillates in the dark, scintillates in the dark, we do not stagger, zombie-zapped, but spark in our bodies glistening in misting rain.Glimmering moments, indeed.