The poems in Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation, which span 50 years of a singular luminous career, are a cosmos. What might it mean to exist as a human being in a particular moment in the intricate and interconnected webs of time and space is a quest and a question in poem after poem ... one way to engage with Sze’s substantial new and collected poems might be to read a poem a day as a kind of koan or text upon which to meditate — such is the richness of this precise, fiercely observant, metaphysical and elegant work ... The Glass Constellation is a beautiful and important testament to the significance of that endeavor, an important illumination in poetry’s cosmic vault.

Arthur Sze offers a stellar collection of lyrical poems that captivate the reader’s heart, even as the personae involved in the individual works also seem affected, sometimes dramatically, sometimes more subtly, but always moved. These poems are full of energy, sometimes boiling below the surface, or recoiling in a desert sunset, but always linking heart and mind with sensation and intellect ... One of Sze’s striking writing characteristics involves his ability and propensity to create simultaneous actions, apparently unrelated, within a singular poem’s context ... The poems engage the contemporary and the historical. Sze’s vision encompasses an amazing variety of animal, reptilian, and vegetal lives. It conveys a rich variety of ecosystems around the globe. It also reaches the heavenly bodies, the ends of the known universe, as well as an abundant variety of human cultures, but always reconnects to the human attempt to perceive ... The Glass Constellation offers a complete course in not only how to write poetry but, even more, how to read it, to encounter it.

Delight, Parnassians. Arthur Sze has returned ... The Glass Constellation, spanning five years of Sze’s compressed lyricism, provides a glimpse into the life of a poet whose work and, in fact, self often seem elusive ... Coming in at a whopping 560 pages, The Glass Constellation has, probably, every word in the English language—but, as usual, he's put them all in their right order. Recognition for Sze’s work has always felt a little overdue ... Nevertheless, it feels good to see such a book released, and it is as satisfying to read as it is to hold: a weighty thing, substantial. It is rare one finds a book of poetry that they could, upon completion, easily use to bludgeon an enemy ... All of the Szes’ wonder at the world: the big of it, the small of it, the unexpected poetry in even the mundane, could fill a river to rush and then spill its banks, but if their riparian joys have any drawback, it is this: this is a book that allows no room for growth, spanning so much work and so much time and so many Arthur Szes that it could be confused with an autobiographical obituary ... Even at 560 pages, it feels like there might be more to say, more Arthur Szes to meet, worth waiting for.

This overflowing trove presents the evolution of Sze’s writing, tracking the germination of his language and the blooming of his style, the accumulation of his diverse interests and techniques, and his distinctive ebb and flow between the moments of bafflement and of epiphany. The experience of parsing through The Glass Constellation in its entirety left me in a state that was nothing short of astonishment ... His taut imagism links itself with classical Chinese poetry and modernists such as Pound, his sudden apostrophes evoke Rilke’s, his vanished speaker is comparable to Szymborska’s, his observational intensity is inherited from Auden and Stevens, his cerebral and self-reflective impulses are suggestive of Ashbery ... Poetry, for Sze, is a way of coming to terms with the world, for which the strange feeling of being in this world always outruns our understanding of what it means to be in this world. His poems, in their lush enigma, replicate our lived encounter with the shimmering contours of this life ... The final poems of The Glass Constellation convey this planetary intimacy—both soothing and unnerving, erotic and potentially fatal—which enwraps us all.

The universe, in its expansions and contractions, seems wholly contained in The Glass Constellation, Arthur Sze’s eleventh collection of poetry, which gathers, along with his newest poems, the entirety of his previous ten books. Yet Sze’s poetry, as a poetry of paradox, is the opposite of containment—it is, as the universe is, an ever-expanding web ... Many of Sze’s poems are built from juxtaposing unlike moments; an experience or image will flash on and into something else ... In the poetic worlds of Arthur Sze, no one person or thing takes precedence over another; there is no hierarchy in what is seen or experienced ... How events, images, and experiences reflect and transform each other by their synchronicity is fundamental to Sze’s circular poetics ... The motion of Sze’s poems is a continuous, circuitous sweep between the microscopic to the expansive, from the first-person perspective—the “I”/“eye”—of the poet. This sweep, in its restlessness, still holds its balance at this tipping point. It knows that to channel desire into an exacting articulation risks changing the frequency of that desire ... Sze is a genius at maintaining clean grammatical shifts in time and place, like a figure-skater spinning through perfect landings and arcs, a singular motion stroke making a figure on ice and blade, or a water calligrapher ... This incandescent collection by one of our time’s most masterful poets is an invitation for us all to see ourselves, our lives, this earth, and one another in clear, attuned radiance, as hanging jewels, each absorbing and reflecting every other, on the 'infinite net' that the poet calls consciousness.

It is not easy to come to terms with a collection on this scale—it encompasses ten collections, plus new uncollected poems, and clocks in at over 500 pages—but if any living American poet merits the attention proper to a career retrospective, it is National Book Award–winning Sze ... A monumental collection from a poet whose lasting importance should now be recognized; essential for dedicated readers of contemporary American poetry.