Into the Hush

Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze’s twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, conjuring a cast of fruit trees and gunshots, butterflies and chemistry, animals and man. Drawing on a craft honed over decades of writing, these poems earn their profound simplicity, moving with imaginative power and emotional force. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of our nuclear age—endangered cultures and the exigencies of climate change—exploring what it means to write on a planet struggling against anthropocene, to “make lines/against a void.” Here poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrastic, epistle and twin pantoums. Poems borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Writing 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. Repeatedly we find cause for praise. Spring/