Reviews

Sight Lines

Arthur Sze

Copper Canyon Press, 2019

It goes without saying that a great deal of lyric poetry is staked on the image: a working out of, or a ricocheting from, or an intellectual probing of from some striking “I saw.” The Old Testament prophets: “What do you see, son of man?” The Old English riddles of the Exeter Book: ic wonderlic wiht geseah. (“I saw a wondrous thing.”) Frost, “I found a dimpled spider.” I saw, I found, there was.

As the title suggests, Sight Lines is a collection of encounters with things seen: a tracing of the image not only back toward the “seer,” but, in the other direction, toward the unseen and unseeable. The first poem in the collection, “Water Calligraphy” begins with an instance of concentrated staring:

A green turtle in broth is brought to the table—

I stare at an irregular formation of rocks

above a pond and spot, on the water’s

surface, a moon.

As the speaker stares at the dish, the eye goes “back and forth/ the moon slides from partial to full/ to partial and then into emptiness.” The poem concludes:

I blink, and a woodblock carver

peels off pear shavings, stroke by stroke

and foregrounds characters against empty space.

Laozi is alluded to here, whose image, in the Tao Te Ching for natural harmony was “the uncarved block,” the thing-in-itself before the act of vision “carves” (and falsifies) its nature  into known categories.

The term “sight line” of course also recalls things aimed at from a distance: the site line of a sniper, for example, or, less sinister, that of an ornithologist. Many of the poems in this collection feature a zeroing in on the far away at the moment when it slips from hiding.

Driving at night between Chinle and Tsaile,

I fixate on deer along the road: in the headlights,

they’re momentarily blinded but could leap out.….

Though warned of elk,

I heed the car with a single headlight enlarging

in my rearview mirror—when the mind

is sparked with pixels, it’s hard to swerve

and brake. The Anasazi must have marveled

at the whitening sheen on the cliff, but tonight

tracks of moonlight run ahead of where I want to be.

Glimpsed in passing, the deer contrasts the remote evocation of the Anasazi and the Arizona wilderness: on the one hand the anonymity of a fleeting animal, on the other the larger anonymity of a historical presence. Both, in a way, “leap out” at the driver, entering the headlight of conscience sympathy.

Finally “sight lines” is only one remove from “headlines:” the way the modern reading experience bounces from one—look!—to another. Many of the poems reflect the restlessness of consciousness of a culture that is goaded from glance to glance:

Crossing the street, you hear the cry of a strawberry finch

and, reaching the curb

catch the smell of a young pig, that, minutes ago,

hurtled across the trail;

inhaling a chocolate scent, you approach a small orchid;

nearby, two streaked

pitcher plants have opened lids but opened laterally;

a fern rises out

of the crotch of an ‘ohi’a tree, and droplets have collected

on a mule’s foot fern.

A botanical riffling of pages—this technique can be disorienting for readers who expect a poem to tell a story or present, in some sort of rhetorical sequence toward a punchline. But Szu’s technique is apt for a collection which attempts to present the visual in all its jostling and jutting weirdness. The poem “The Radiant’s” concludes:

A plume rises where lava reaches

the ocean. Who said, Out of nothing

nothing can come? We do not lie

in a meadow to view the Persides

but discover, behind a motel,

a vineyard, and gather as we go.

The location of “behind a motel” seems chosen for the purpose of evoking, as so many of the poems do, a temporary resting place—something to be inhabited and moved on from. Motels are places to “gather as we go”—soaps, shampoos, nights spent channel-surfing or looking out windows—“from the vinyard,” sometime later, trod into wine.

(Reviewed by Jeremy Penna)