Compass Rose

Arthur Sze

Just as the compass rose points to the cardinal directions and is a psychic image and navigational symbol, Arthur Sze’s new poems chart the ever-shifting terrain of our dizzying, contemporary world with masterful precision, imaginative force, and deep emotion. In Compass Rose, he offers a significant departure from his previous books, employing multiple voices to guide us through wonderful and complicated perspectives. Sze’s poems reorient us and make us experience the ecologies of this world in full sensual detail.

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ISBN: 9781556594670

Format: Paperback

After a New Moon

Each evening you gaze in the southwest sky

as a crescent extends in argentine light.

When the moon was new, your mind was

desireless, but now both wax to the world.

While your neighbor’s field is cleared,

your corner plot is strewn with desiccated

sunflower stalks. You scrutinize the bare

apricot limbs that have never set fruit,

the wisteria that has never blossomed,

and wince, hearing how, at New Year’s,

teens bashed in a door and clubbed strangers.

Near a pond, someone kicks a dog out

of a pickup. Each second, a river edged

with ice shifts course. Last summer’s

exposed tractor tire is nearly buried

under silt. An owl lifts from a poplar,

while the moon, no, the human mind

moves from brightest bright to darkest dark.

About the Author

Arthur Sze has published eleven books of poetry, including Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award, and The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021). His other books include Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998, selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago …

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Reviews

“Compass Rose [is] a collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our interconnected world.” —Pulitzer Prize finalist announcement

“If only a few books were to survive civilization’s collapse, were to stand as ‘poems of evidence’ that life once flourished, I would hope Arthur Sze’s to be among them.” —AGNI

“Everything can happen in the teeming space of a stanza by Arthur Sze; almost everything does. The profane and the glorious are never far apart; more often than not they are contained in the same couplet… Sze specializes in the serial or linked poem. He specializes in irresoluble contradictions and the simultaneity of their circumstance. He is deft with improbable metamorphoses. He is undeterred from the uninflected actual… All that is teeming is specific and nothing is unrelated… Sze is hyper-awake to a chance that a petal may tip the balance of life; to the fact that ‘we cannot act if we are asleep.'” —Judge’s citation, Jackson Poetry Prize, 2013