The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 by Arthur Sze (review)

B o o k Reviews 473 The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970— 1998. By Arthur Sze. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1998. 265 pages, $17.00. Reviewed by David Axelrod Eastern Oregon University, La Grande Inspired by the multiculturalism endemic to the Am erican Southwest, Arthur Sze’s poems are a rich cross-pollination of styles, ways of knowing, and landscapes drawn from A sian, N ative Am erican, and scientific sources (he is particularly fond of mycol­ ogy). Bringing together Sze’s most recent work with modest selec­ tions from the 1970s, and all his work published since the 1980s, The Redshifting Web brims with pleasures as intellectually satisfying as they are sensually luminous. To arrange these selected poems, Sze followed a common pattern, sandwiching earlier work between newer work. The wild, intelligent beauty of his poetry from the 1990s shocks in contrast with his com­ petent apprentice work, which was written in his teens and twenties and reads like Asian poetry in translation. The more mature work of the 1980s, also written in a conventional style, pales in comparison to the poems that begin and end this collection, though it pales only in comparison to these. In Dazzled (1982) and River River (1987), we witness Sze’s discovery of his true subject, its sources of inspiration, and the poet’s growing dissatisfaction with conventional styles to reveal the atmosphere of the mind. The title of the collection at hand refers to the astronomical phenomenon in which the distance of an object receding into space appears closer than it actually is; the “red shift” is the method by which spectrums are interpreted to correct for actual distance of an object from its observer— a fine metaphor for how poems approach experience. Sze is not as interested in the conventionally elegiac dimensions of this phenomenon as in the “web” of physical objects, their mysterious presence, and our entanglements with their partic­ ulars. Despite the challenges this newer work presents, Sze offers help along the way. In “Stream ers,” a summary image suggests how these poems approach knowing, which he sees as a search “among bright gold threads / for a black pattern in the weave” (182). In Sze’s mature work, the tension between immediate physical presence and elegy becomes a dance. He poses intellectual problems, then draws us into the dizzying gravity of things. If he offers a solution, it is revealed obliquely. “Where does matter end and space begin?” he asks in “Before Completion” (4). Immediately, we find ourselves stum­ bling into the vortex of the physical: 474 WAL 3 4 .4 WINTER 2 0 0 0 blue jay eating suet; juggling three crumpled newspaper balls wrapped with duct tape; tasseling corn; the gravitational bending of light; “We’re dying”; stringing a coral necklace; he drew his equations on butcher paper. (4) And so Sze goes on until he asks, “what is it like to catch up with light?” He concludes: “he threw Before Com pletion: / six in the third place, nine in the sixth” (5). Consistently playful and adventuresome, the form of Sze’s new poems becomes the solution to the questions the poet asks: at a speed approximating the speed of light, the mind constructs a web of mutu­ alities, connective tissue that holds these fragments together. Experiences may recede to a great distance, but the red shift of con­ sciousness nevertheless holds experience, and its multiplicity of meanings, near enough to understand it with painful intimacy. Sze thus achieves something extraordinary: he reinvents elegy, creating a peculiar anodyne for loss. Fever D ream s: Contemporary Arizona Poetry. Edited by Leilani Wright and James Cervantes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. 232 pages, $35.00/$ 16.95. Review ed by Bert Almon University of Alberta, Edmonton Leilani Wright and James Cervantes have compiled a generous selection of poems by thirty-nine Arizona poets, with headnotes pro­ vided by the authors. The brief introduction points out a condition which will be interesting to readers of western American poetry: “Most of the poetry in this anthology . . . grows out of times, places and ideas that are foreign to this state because most of the poets rep­ resented in this text...