The Ginkgo Light by Arthur Sze
2009; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 83; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2009.0347
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
Resumo> o ^ ^1 Being contraryand prone to lurch& stumble /Yet is my sleep postponed / By theseprolific showers of shoot ing stars / Blazing their luminary trails across the heavens. / Much iswrit in their countenance / But not the destiny ofmen or such tri fles/' We follow Shannon's thoughts as he remembers his mother, his brother who died, a young woman he strongly desired and courted, a preacher he could not respect; we experience his growing desperation as he searches forany sort of food and questions the received and com monplace notions ofGod. "Coming to theriver tobreakfastupon grapes & water / I spy a drowned buffalo caught up on a snag /Near shore? alas, ithas gone torot/No meat but isputrid /& unfit foraman. Itwas but a calf,scrawny /& well-gnawed by wolves." "What of the Wade's farmburned down /Their little baby killed? /Was that to punish Mr. Wade fordrinkingwhiskey? / . . . The God thatkeeps the sparrow / Keeps not theWade baby, why is that?"Crawling alongwith Shannon over the bare terrain, close to starva tion, the immediate future uncertain, we bear down on the essential ques tionsofour existence and thatofGod in thisdeeply accomplished book. FredDings UniversityofSouthCarolina Arthur Sze. The Ginkgo Light. Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Can yon. 2009. vii + 69 pages. $15. isbn 978-1-55659-299-7 "Corpses push up through thaw ing permafrost / as I scrape salm on skin off a pan in the sink: on the porch, motes in slanting yel low light / undulate in air." Thus begins Arthur Sze's ninth collection of poetry, The Ginkgo Light, and from these first lines to the final pages of the book, we encounter radically disparate images set adrift as loosely strung archipelagoes of language. Yet as the first word of the book announces ("corpses"), thisbook will deal more thanbefore with the balance between life and death, birth and extinction.So while his poems still teem with his sig nature collages of exquisitely tex tured language of the everyday, as in the first stanza of the book's titlepoem?"A downy woodpecker drills intoa utilitypole /While you cut stems, arrange tulips in a vase, / I catch a down bow on theA string, beginning / of Song of the Wind.We savor black beans / with cilantro and rice,pinot noir; as lightslants / through thekitchenwindow, spring is candlelight / at our fingertips"? these pleasing images shift without warning to jarringscenes of human sufferingand loss: "Ice crunches in river / breakup: someone shovels snow in a driveway, / collapses, and, hospitalized, catches staph / infection:out of airplane wreckage, a woman identifies the ring on the charred corpse / ofher spouse." Weaving these materials togeth er (ifalways loosely enough forthem to remain distinct), Sze's poetry invokes an ecology, or philosophy, of interconnectednessnot unlike the central metaphor ofChinese Huayan Buddhism?the image of Indra's Net?where all phenomena are single jewels holding within them selves the infinite reflectionsof every other jewel in existence. The cosmic scale of this interconnectivitydoes not homogenize differences into a simple fuzzy "unity," but instead presences the mind-numbing com plexity of the phenomenal world's ever-sWfting interconnections. Birth needs something other than birth to be born; death needs something other than death to offer itself as what it is. Sze begins the volume's centralpoem, "Spectral Light,"with the forty-thirdline of the ancient Chinese textTianWen: "Who passes through thegates of the fourdirec tions?" Perhaps this is a trickques tion; perhaps no single person or ^^^H thingpasses through the gates but ^^^H instead emerges from them (as they are given a place, or location in ^^^H space) toexist at all. Yet thisbook takesnot a bejew eled net, but the fanning leaves of the gingko tree to be its central image. Radiating outward, the poems of thisvolume literally take off in different trajectories from a single shared stem, for on the middle two pages of the book, we find a single vertical list ofNative American tribes. Those familiar with Arthur Sze's careerwill know that this is a listof the tribalaffilia tions of the students he has taught over several decades at the Institute of American Indian Arts (Sze was recently appointed the institute's first professor emeritus). Read ing The Ginkgo Light as a single poem, we might say that the stem...
Referência(s)