Into the Hush

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD A PEN / JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD FINALIST 
'Wise, beguiling... a treasure and a beacon of a poet, whose indispensable body of work offers no less than a way to navigate this world' Sarah Howe 
A new collection and first UK publication from the Poet Laureate of the United States 
Arthur Sze has long been renowned for his constellation of vision and generous imagination – able to hold the aspen leaf and the mountain range, the water droplet and the crashing surf in the same stunning poetic field. 
Turning his attention to habitat destruction, language extinction, mortality and so much more, Into the Hush sketches a world slipping into silence, asking what we lose to it, what emerges, and what can be held in its aperture. 
 Sze draws together a startling array of imagery in these quietly forceful poems that render our complex universe with profound simplicity and clarity. Sze’s lyric voice – which at times inhabits the body of a jaguar and even an eraser – moves between chaos and stillness with supple agility, challenging our notions of traditional poetic forms such as the haibun, zuihitsu, sonnet and pantoum to break open new avenues of expression that speak to our fragmented world. 
 Attuned to the underlying network that connects all things, Into the Hush charts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich possibilities of existence.

Arthur Sze is a treasure and a beacon of a poet, whose indispensable body of work offers no less than ‘a way to navigate this world’. As wise as it is beguiling, Into the Hush reminds me of George Eliot’s ‘roar which lies on the other side of silence’. These poems lead us through the intermeshing worlds of matter and spirit, science and instinct, to touch the beating heart of things. ‘[H]ere is the anvil on which to hammer your days–’: I, for one, am ready to accept the invitation, the challenge.

Sarah Howe, author of Foretokens

[A] bold vision of the world’s fragility: one of unceasing iridescence and glimmer, even in the face of ecological destruction and dilapidation… Even in its continual replenishing beauty, the collection is eerie, as though these poems were a last attempt to bring order to the disorder of living

Gorgeous and powerful... a collection of formal dexterity and profound empathy, which is most deeply felt through Sze’s vivid and precise imagery. Moving through human and non-human perspectives, Sze considers nature, time, and interconnectedness, in elegant and utterly arresting language. I finished this collection with fresh eyes and a renewed love for poetry-reading

Arthur Sze has long been renowned for his constellation of vision and generous imagination – able to hold the aspen leaf and the mountain range, the water droplet and the crashing surf in the same stunning poetic field. 
 
Turning his attention to habitat destruction, language extinction, mortality and so much more, Into the Hush sketches a world slipping into silence, asking what we lose to it, what emerges, and what can be held in its aperture. 
 
Sze draws together a startling array of imagery in these quietly forceful poems that render our complex universe with profound simplicity and clarity. Sze’s lyric voice – which at times inhabits the body of a jaguar and even an eraser – moves between chaos and stillness with supple agility, challenging our notions of traditional poetic forms such as the haibun, zuihitsu, sonnet and pantoum to break open new avenues of expression that speak to our fragmented world. 
 
Attuned to the underlying network that connects all things, Into the Hush charts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich possibilities of existence.

Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze is a treasure and a beacon of a poet, whose indispensable body of work offers no less than ‘a way to navigate this world’. These poems lead us through the intermeshing worlds of matter and spirit, science and instinct, to touch the beating heart of things

Arthur Sze's writing is breathtaking in its scope and crystalline in its precision, marrying the infinitesimal with the infinite. Reading Sze's poems is a rejuvenating act which "quicken[s] the living to the living", offering a masterclass in the art of paying attention to the miraculousness of being alive

Mary Jean Chan, author of Bright Fear

Inside these poems of billowing consciousness, we too are alive to a spectrum of wonders

[A] bold vision of the world’s fragility: one of unceasing iridescence and glimmer, even in the face of ecological destruction and dilapidation

This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet

Moving through human and non-human perspectives, Sze considers nature, time, and interconnectedness, in elegant and utterly arresting language

The sureness of Sze’s language and the clarity of his eye present a compelling picture of the world

[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience - astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism-and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness

Sze is a deeply philosophical word scientist; every increment of livingness has weight: history, experience, and sound. The lines move between the microscopic and the cosmic. The poem is a universe of unexpected juxtapositions—a droplet, a lichen, a bird, to create a fresh world

[Arthur Sze] uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our interconnected world

New and Collected Poems

For the past five decades, Arthur Sze has been a major force in American letters. Deeply influenced by Classical Chinese poetry, as well as the interplay between philosophy and science, Sze’s luminous verse is attuned to the minutiae of our natural world and our place within it. 
 
This volume brings together ten collections across Sze’s career, including Compass Rose (shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize) and Sight Lines (winner of the National Book Award), as well as twenty-six new poems. Moving from the quark to the jaguar, the sunflower to the Molotov cocktail, Sze’s vertiginous poems transform our atomized world through a restless, cinematic eye into an exploded network of surprising connections. These works harness the simple building blocks of language to construct rich poems that dazzle, like jewels in a chandelier, with a profound resonance and an irrepressible light. 
 
The Glass Constellation is a singular invitation for readers to immerse themselves in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest living poets.

Arthur Sze

Books by Arthur Sze

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