"Classically elegant."--The New York Times Book Review "Sze's list-laden sequences capture the world's manifold facts one by one, then through discursive commentary exact from them a sense not only of aesthetic order but of universal cause and effect."--Boston Review A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and perseverance to transform the world's factual darkness into precarious splendor. "Each hour teems," Sze writes, as he ingeniously integrates the world's miraculous and mundane--a woodpecker drilling a utility pole or a 1300-year-old lotus seed--into a moving, visionary journey. Mayans charted Venus's motion across the sky, poured chocolate into jars and interred themwith the dead. A woman dips three bowls intohair's fur glaze, places them in a kiln, anticipatesremoving them, red-hot, to a shelf to cool.When samba melodies have dissipated into air, when lights wrapped around a willow have vanished, what pattern of shifting lines leads to Duration? Arthur Sze, one of America's leading poets, is the author of nine books of poetry and translation. He is professor emeritus of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and just completed a term as Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.