Into the Hush
Updated: Aug 8
I picked up the latest book from our latest Poet Laureate of the United States alongside four other books of, about, or containing poetry (by Refaat Alareer, Tracy K. Smith, Amanda G. Elsbury, as well as the collection The People’s Project) at the public library in early April in celebration of National Poetry Month. In between, I also read Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Against Breaking by Ada Limón during a trip to my college town of Bloomington, Indiana. Not that any explanations are required, but all of this—including the fact that I read Gay’s and Limón’s books twice, as well as this one—is why I come to be reviewing Into the Hush in the third week of June, with National Poetry Month long since faded into the rearview mirror.
I was not familiar with Sze before being named the nation’s 25th Poet Laureate, but the library was, or at least familiar enough to have his previous collection of poems, 2021’s The Glass Constellation, also on the shelves. He is our first Asian-American Poet Laureate, and, I figured, given his age (75), he might be one of the oldest to serve, but not so. There have been eight older than Sze, including Stanley Kunitz, who was 95 when he served. I wouldn’t know what to do if I were appointed Poet Laureate of anything, least of all of the United States, but if I set those fears aside, at the relatively spritely age of 53, there is time for me yet!
From Erika Blumenfeld’s bioluminescence photograph that graces the cover (about which she says of the project on her website, “It is remarkable the poetry of how a nearly microscopic creature of such import to the health of Earth’s oceans and biosphere and which is so at risk from our civilization’s impact, could yet show us how to illuminate the dark.”) to the spacious margins and ample leading, the book’s design is a wonderful extension of Sze’s poetry, setting the reader up for something mysterious, unexpected, startling, and, one hopes, quiet, too.
Into the Hush is all of those things, and while I loved the powerful imagery, jarring contrasts, and Kawabataesque simplicity that seemed to undergird everything, the poems themselves—or perhaps it was the collection as a whole—often stirred nothing in me emotionally. That’s why I read the book a second time. Was it him? Is it me? (It very well might be me.) Sze has a keen eye for noticing and a proclivity for making connections where there would otherwise seem to be randomness, but the observations felt profound because of the attempt at synchronicity, not because connecting the random observations into synchronicity was patently profound.
Maybe I’m splitting hairs here. After all, anyone who looks at a piece of modern art and says, “I could do that,” is missing the point. The point isn’t whether anyone could do it; the point is that someone did when no one had before. I respect Sze as a craftsman and as a technician, and I don’t think we’re quite done with each other yet—The Glass Constellation is only an online checkout and 10 minutes away. In the end, there was much to admire in Into the Hush, but also, sadly, much that left me indifferent.
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