Poetry. 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. "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.