To read Arthur Sze's The Redshshifling Web is to walk through Paul Rivet's Musee de l'Homme, research institute of Surrealist movement its scientific repository. The book's near-dishevel of human artifact and natural object is a display that resists artificiality of ordering systems, reveling defamiliarization provoked by stark juxtaposition. But Sze is no cheap trickster out for an easy shock: he's an ethnographer and naturalist who poetically ponders Malinowskian imponderables, throwing an 1 Ching of images to make some sense of the most mysterious of all possible worlds (Kaiseki 29). In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford argues for an Ethnographic Surrealism which artists and ethnographers subject their culture to activity of fragmentation and collage rendering familiar strange. These participant observers delight in cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms:''1 Clifford himself describes transformation of British game cricket Trobriand islands: Now it is Indic warfare, extravagant sexual display, political competition and alliance, parody.... [O]n a chair sits umpire, calmly influencing game with magical spells. He is chewing betel nut, which he shares out from a stash held on his lap. It is a bright blue plastic Adidas bag.2 Here is Sze: you are walking across MoonCrossing Bridge slashing rain, / meet a Rinzai monk with a fax machine / who likes to crank up a Victrola with a gold horn... (The Flower Path 211-2). This image, as with most of images Sze's beautiful poems, is left unadorned, un-interpreted, lyrically resonant with its own predeterminations: Sze announces, allowing images to be slogans for themselves and not become a message service for poet's beliefs. The reader, too, becomes a participant, as if Sze has constructed small kinetic sculptures that observer slowly realizes are moving, part, because sculptures are being observed and thought about. The poems many ways resemble act of thinking itself at synaptic level: poems render intelligible our innate sense of similarity and relevance among disparate images and activities by resembling way these disparate things enter consciousness first place. The poems, though, are not cold portrayals, but are infused with an uncloying sincerity and an understanding of human tragedy that is very much lacking American poetry. The collected works span twenty-eight years, with selections from Sze's first two collections, The Willow Wind (1972) and Two Ravens (1976), and three complete books, Dazzled ( 1982), River River ( 1987), and his breakthrough work, Archipelago ( 1995). The collection begins with several new poems, all of which are poem sequences, which Sze now writes almost exclusively. The reader moves from nearly baroque incorporation of Sze's recent work back to his more timid, lyric early work. The poems his first two collections wear Tang dynasty poets on their sleeves; two poems are, fact, titled Li Po and Wei:' Sze does not capitalize on an Orientalism, instead he recognizes efficacies of this early Chinese aesthetic to capture uniqueness of a very American landscape. As Wang Wei's poetry, landscape is everything Sze's early poems: Landscape and feeling tangle until startle of sparks and flight a hallucinatory acceptance of edgy loneliness of a desert buried snow. The greenness of wine, too, signals strangeness; fact, green is often, for Sze, a surreal color, a sign that all is what it seems: odd, yet familiar. Though early work is more lyrically grounded, it utilizes a synaptic poetic that runs through all of Sze's poetry. His insistent iterations and images-green, glints, sheens, glazes, mushrooms, birds, fish, human skin-rescue work from precious and precocious free associations. By framing poems around a stable of images, Sze's synaptic poetic urges reader toward sensing, commanding her to see, taste, feel, hear moment that was impetus for poetic moment through a transparent language: poem is a mind at work, and reader thinks with poem inside poem, as if it is directing firing mechanisms reader's own mind. …