Arthur Sze

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.