Arthur Sze – författare

“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 themwith the dead. A woman dips three bowls intohair’s fur glaze, places them in a kiln, anticipatesremoving 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.

Arthur Sze has rare qualifications when it comes to translating Chinese: he is an award-winning poet who was raised in both languages. A second-generation Chinese-American, Sze has gathered over 70 poems by poets who have had a profound effect on Chinese culture, American poetics and Sze''s own maturation as an artist. Also included is an informative insightful essay on the methods and processes involved in translating ideogrammic poetry.

MOONLIGHT NIGHT

by Tu Fu

Her hair is damp in the fragrant mist. Her arms are cold in the clear light. When will we lean beside the window and the moon shine on our dried tears?

Sze''s anthology features poets who have become literary icons to generations of Chinese readers and scholars. Included are the poems of the great, rarely translated female poet Li Ching Chao alongside the remorseful exile poems of Su Tung-p''o. This book will prove a necessary and insightful addition to the library of any reader of poetry in translation.

The poets include: T''ao Ch''ien Wang Han Wang Wei Li Po Tu Fu Po Chü-yi Tu Mu Li Shang-yin Su Tung-p''o Li Ch''ing-chao Shen Chou Chu Ta Wen I-to Yen Chen

Arthur Sze is the author of six previous books of poetry, including The Redshifting Web and Archipelago. He has received the Asian American Literary Award for his poetry and translation, a prestigious Lannan Literary Award, and was recently a finalist for the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

from A Painting of a Cat

Nan Ch''uan wanted to be reborn as a water buffalo, but who did the body of the malicious cat become? Black clouds and covering snow are alike. It took thirty years for clouds to disperse, snow to melt.

-Pa-ta-shan-jen (1626-1705)

The Last Day

Water sobs and sobs in the bamboo pipe gutter. Green tongues of banana leaves lick at the windowpanes. The four sur

“Sze brings together disparate realms of experience—-astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness.”—The New Yorker

“Sze’s poems seem dazzled and haunted by patterns.”—The Washington Post

Quipu was a tactile recording device for the pre-literate Inca, an assemblage of colored knots on cords. In his eighth collection of poetry, Arthur Sze utilizes quipu as a unifying metaphor, knotting and stringing luminous poems that move across cultures and time, from elegy to ode, to create a precarious splendor.

Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root, slap a mosquito on my arm. We go on, but stop when gnats lift into a cloud as we stumble into a bunch of rose apples rotting on the ground.

Long admired for his poetic fusions of science, history, and anthropology, in Quipu, Sze’s lines and language are taut and mesmerizing, nouns can become verbs—“where is passion that orchids the body?”—and what appears solid and -stable may actually be fluid and volatile.

A point of exhaustion can become a point of renewal: it might happen as you observe a magpie on a branch, or when you tug at a knot and discover that a grief disentangles, dissolves into air. Renewal is not possible to a calligrapher who simultaneously draws characters with a brush in each hand; it occurs when the tip of a brush slips yet swerves into flame . . .

Arthur Sze is the author of eight books of poetry and a volume of translations. He is the recipient of an Asian American Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in New Mexico.

2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist

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

[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience—astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."—The New Yorker

A child playing a game, tea leaves resting in a bowl, an abandoned dog, a foot sticking out from a funeral pyre, an Afghan farmer pausing as mortars fire at the enemy: in Arthur Sze''s tenth book, the world spins on many points of reference, unfolding with full sensuous detail.

Arthur Sze is the author of The Ginkgo Light (2009), Quipu (2005), and The Redshifting Web (1998). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In The Silk Dragon II, National Book Award–winning poet Arthur Sze presents a sophisticated vision of the vitality, diversity, and power of the Chinese poetic tradition. Traveling over one and a half millennia, Sze guides readers through a luminous history of verse, from the contemplative insights of fifth century poet Tao Qian, through Tang dynasty poets such as Wang Wei and Du Fu, and into subsequent centuries in which lived such innovative artists as Li Qingzhao and Bada Shanren, among many others. 

Extending the work from the original 2001 volume, The Silk Dragon II then traces classical Chinese poetry’s eruption into the free verse of the modern and contemporary eras, introducing groundbreaking poems by the Chinese Modernist master Wen Yiduo, as well as those from major living poets such as Wang Jiaxin, Zhai Yongming, and Xi Chuan. Through this remarkable journey—deepened by Sze’s personal introduction—we see that the “impossible task” of translation is yet rich with encounter, as both long-lost voices and those still speaking enter the same conversation, with the same vivacity.

*Winner of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement*

With imaginative power and emotional force, Into The Hush explores the exigencies of climate change, of endangered cultures, and of our nuclear age.

Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze’s twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, widens and deepens. Through an earned and profound simplicity, these poems move with imaginative power and emotional force and gather a startling array of contrasts—from wildfires to a sprig of sunrise, from gunshots to a spirit evoked by swaying candles—to address the challenges of our nuclear age. Here, poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrasis, pantoum and segmented zuihitsu. They borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of climate change, exploring what it means to live on an endangered planet. Written at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence.