The winners of the
National Book awards for 2019 were announced on November 20 at a ceremony in New
York City at Cipriani Wall Street restaurant.
Today’s post offers an excerpt from winning poetry Sight Lines by Arthur Sze.
Overview:
From
the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in
China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor,
from
the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium
triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and
divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze
employs a wide range of voices―from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent―and his mythic
imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet,
balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and
transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.
 |
| Arthur Sze |
The Critics:
"...The
Sight Lines is Sze's 10th collection are just that―imagistic lines strung
together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a
portrait of simultaneity..." ―The New
York Times
"These
new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head-on, may best stand its
tests." ―Lit Hub
“...This
is poetry of assemblage, where violence and beauty combine and hang on Sze's
particular gift for the leaping non sequitur. ‘Green tips of tulips are rising
out of the earth— / you don't flense a whale or fire at beer cans / in an
arroyo but catch the budding / tips of pear branches and wonder,’ Sze
writes. Inside these poems of billowing consciousness, we too are alive to a
spectrum of wonders.--The New York Times Book Review - Tess Taylor
"The
wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and
daily routine bring life to the poems in Sight Lines." ―Library Journal
Judges’ Citation:
Arthur
Sze writes with a quiet mastery which generates beautiful, sensuous, inventive,
and emotionally rich poems. Sight Lines unfurls like ink in water, circulating
through meditations on the natural world; the pleasure and associational depth
of eating food; and the profound constitutions of self through memory, human
relationships, and experience of the actual world. A keen awareness arises of
structural, environmental, and social threats in the midst of this expansive
beauty.
Three Poems:
 |
| Tigris River, left. |
Deer
browse at sunrise in an apple orchard,
while
honey locust leaves litter the walk.
A
neighbor hears gunshots in the bosque
and
wonders who's firing at close range;
I
spot bear prints near the Pojoaque River
but
see no sign of the reported mountain lion.
As
chlorophyll slips into the roots of a cottonwood
and
the leaves burst into yellow gold, I wonder,
where's
our mortal flare? You can travel
to
where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together
and
admire the inventions of people living
on
floating islands of reeds; you can travel
along
an archipelago and hike among volcanic
pools
steaming with water and sulfuric acid;
but
you can't change the eventual, adamant body.
Though
death might not come like a curare-
dipped
dart blown out of a tube or slam
at
you like surf breaking over black lava rock,
it
will come—it will come—and it unites us—
brother,
sister, boxer, spinner—in this pact,
while
you inscribe a letter with trembling hand.
 |
| Morning glories |
Porch
light illuminating white steps, light
over
a garage door, darkness inside windows—
and
the darkness exposes the tenuous.
A
glass blower shapes a rearing horse
that
shifts, on a stand, from glowing orange
to
glistening crystal; suddenly the horse
shatters
into legs, head, body, mane.
At
midnight, “Fucking idiot!” a woman yells,
shaking
the house; along a hedge,
a
man sleeps, coat over head, legs sticking out;
and,
at 8 am, morning glories open
on
a fence; a backhoe heads up the street.
From
this window, he views banana leaves,
an
orange tree with five oranges, house
with
shingled roofs, and steps leading
to
an upstairs apartment; farther off, palm trees,
and,
beyond, a sloping street, ocean, sky;
but
what line of sight leads to revelation?
Black Center
Green
tips of tulips are rising out of the earth—
you
don’t flense a whale or fire at beer cans
in
an arroyo but catch the budding
tips
of pear branches and wonder what
it’s
like to live along a purling edge of spring.
Jefferson
once tried to assemble a mastodon
skeleton
on the White House floor but,
with
pieces missing, failed to sequence the bones;
when
the last speaker of a language dies,
a
hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light.
Last
night, you sped past revolving and flashing
red,
blue, and white lights along the road—
a
wildfire in the dark; though no one
you
knew was taken in the midnight ambulance,
an
arrow struck a bull’s eye and quivered
in
its shaft: one minute gratitude rises
like
water from an underground lake,
another
dissolution gnaws from a black center.
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