Collected Poems

by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harold Bloom (Editor)

At last, a major American poet collected for the first time in the sixth volume of the definitive Library of Edition of her works

In his last book, Harold Bloom presents the earthy, surprising, and lyrical poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin’s career began and ended with poetry. This sixth volume in the definitive Library of America edition of her works gathers, for the first time, her collected poems—from her earliest collection Wild Angels (1974) through her final publication, the collection So Far So Good, which she delivered to her editor just a week before her death in 2018.

The themes explored in the poems gathered here resonate through all Le Guin’s oeuvre, but find their strongest voice in her poetry: exploration as a metaphor for both human bravery and creativity, the mystery and fragility of nature and the impact of humankind on their environment, the Tao Te Ching, marriage, womanhood, and even cats. Le Guin’s poetry is often traditional in form but never in style: her verse is earthy, surprising, and lyrical.

Including some 40 poems never before collected, this volume restores to print much of Le Guin's remarkable verse. It features a new introduction by editor Harold Bloom, written before his death in 2019, in which he reflects on the power of Le Guin’s poems, which he calls “American originals.” It also features helpful explanatory notes and a chronology of Le Guin’s life.

Genres: Poetry

850 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.

She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.

Reviews

[Walter Francis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been reading this book very slowly over the past month or so and I’m almost upset I’ve finally finished.

Such a beautiful, clear, original point of view surveying the whole of a literary life. Le Guin is one of my favorite fantasists and her poetry has every ounce of her inventiveness, and some of the most transcendent poetry about motherhood, nature, and the human need to create and be understood.

I’ll read this one again and again and again.

[Jiapei Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this year of changes and unpredictability, I feel the need to read some poetry to calm the mind. I bought this collection last year from my favorite sci-fi/fantasy bookstore in SF: Borderlands. I've only read Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness before, so I'm curious how her poetry would be. The plan is to nibble at this, perhaps a poem a day, and see how things go.

Introduction
...by none other than Harold Bloom. A friendship via emails but never in person. From Le Guin herself: "And in poetry, beauty is no ornament: it is the meaning. It is the truth."

Wild Angels
I find the length of these poems perfect for a short read right before heading to work, waiting for my commute rail to arrive.
Some repeating motifs: hide-and-seek, hawks, and general musings on Nature. I like the poem "Offering", where she imagined the loss of the memory of a dream as a sacrifice to the gods of darkness.

Hard Words
I Wordhoard

The old violinist
has crossed the gulf of the decades
on a highwire of catgut.

- "For Karl and Jean"

I'm enjoying the imagery of excavating words from ancient rocks, like the past could whisper to us.

II The Dancing at Tillai
This section is pretty wild. Lots of wantonness and lewd vibes.

III Line Drawings
Repeated mentions of rock, mica, tear/streams. I like the last poem "Winter Downs" with its rotating imageries of sheep, eyes, and thorns.

IV Walking in Cornwall
I'm not familiar with the geography of Cornwall, but the poems felt like hiking through Tolkien's Middle-earth, featuring lots of gorse (some sort of yellow-flowered plant, according to my cursory Google search).

V Simple Hill
Many repeated words or lines in these poems, kinda like nursery rhymes.
I love this little line: Each rose a maze - "Amazed"

Wild Oats and Fireweed
Part One: Places
I've taken about a month's break from this ... unintentionally. Picking this up again and will attempt to read about what I would've read in a month.
This section is very apocalyptic - the death of a lake after a volcano eruption felt visceral.

Part Two: Woman
This part is written more literally - on the vulnerable (yet) strong women.

Part Three: Words
the wastes of St Helens,
a tall, feathered dancer,
casting its ash-seeds. - "Wild Oats and Fireweed"

Part Four: Women
And may you be in this house
as the music is in the instrument. - "For the New House"

What's Mind? Its continuity. - "Tenses"

Compared to the second part (Woman), these poems feature more mature women: mothers, old women who were lost in time and irrationality, married women reconciling their marriage.

No Boats
A small collection of poems featuring rivers.

Going out with Peacocks
One: Fire, Water, Earth, Breath
Le Guin's poems on nature are so calming, even if they do not penetrate my soul or whatever.

Two: Fury and Sorrow
Here, the poems turn political, ending with a series of fragments reimagining what the sisters and daughters in Hunan have been writing in secret (based on true findings from a Chinese newspaper clipping). Contempt, forlornness... Le Guin's women in her poems do not mince words when it comes to their emotions.

Three: Kin and Kind
Warm poems on familial relations (roughly).

Four: Dancing on the Sun
Unruly women dancing on hot grounds.

Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts
Deep Ocean, mother of music,
in which all islands
are silences,
rests. - "The Seasons of Oling"

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
Introduction: And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it i the meaning. It is the truth.
Alright, I'm excited to see what Le Guin has done with such an iconic piece of text and make poetry out of it.

13 Shameless
To be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.

So far, Le Guin's take on Tao Te Ching feels very close to Octavia Butler's Parables, in terms of language.

78 Paradoxes
Nothing in the world
is as soft, as weak, as water;
nothing else can wear away
the hard, the strong,
and remain unaltered.

Many poems in this section concern with duality and subverting expectations: weak is strong, poor is rich, true leaders don't lead etc. While I see the wisdom in some, I do have reservations for others - the poems (or Tao Te Ching, rather) seem to ask us to not be meddled by worldly affairs and basically do nothing... and that's everything. Maybe it's too nihilistic for me.

Alright I finally worked through the afterword in this section, which gives context to how Le Guin approached Tao Te Ching. She didn't translate directly from Chinese, but instead perused several versions of English translations (including one with direct 1-1 translation of each Chinese character, though it can be argued that Chinese characters often carry multiple meanings and thus impossible to match with a single English word) and attempted to bring out what she considered as Lao Tzu would've intended. This includes artistic and subjective choices of omitting certain sections that she deemed as contradictory or irrelevant. I appreciate the transparency on her approach, but I'd take these poem (interpretations) with a grain of salt.

Sixty Odd
Interesting mishmash of poems, trending towards the personal in the second half. I enjoyed the snippets of family members and odd characters, always depicted with tenderness and love.

Incredible Good Fortune
A return to the fantastical, including a retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood!

Quatrains - November
My feet in cold shallow sea waves
Make the rustle of dry leaves.
My feet in red fallen dry leaves
Make the plashing of sea waves.

VII 24 Knots at Night (Notes from a Cruise)
A level waterfall, our wake
flees flashing white into the dark.
The ceaseless engine-thunder shakes
the mind to silence, and a stark
and starless blackness with no break,
no hint of light, surrounds this ark
that bears across the midnight stream
a thousand sleepers and their dreams.

Overall, a quite loose collection of poems with several running themes: poems tied to journeys (e.g. a cruise) and places, reflections on history and words.

Out Here
I quite like this collection of poems pondered in deserts, pastures, and caves.

A Meditation in the Desert
...the music is,
a winkling of the air as immaterial
and brief as sunlight glancing on a wave.
...
Rock has no tongue to speak or voice to sing,
mute, heavy matter. Yet as I lift up this
dull desert stone, the weight of it is full
of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have.

Finding My Elegy
Coast Range Highway, November
Sky gloom and gleam.
Road rain-glaze glare.
Infinite light glitters
in fern-fronds, fir-needles,
flashes from great gold maples.
...
The next rain crouches
in the yoke of the hills,
dark-grey puma
with a misty tail
lashing the silent
trees of the forest.

This section is organized by different themes e.g. botany, theology, meteorology etc. with shared themes of time/age, nature, freedom.

Late in the Day
Kinship
Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.

Ugh I just love Le Guin's depiction of trees.

In Ashland
She said to me, they were
like thoughts moving in a mind,
the little birds among the many leaves.

The Salt
The salt in the small bowl looks up at me
with all its little glittering eyes and says:
I am the dry sea.
Your blood tastes of me.

Definition, or, Seeing the Horse
To define's not to confine,
words can't reach so far.
Even the poet's line can only hold
a moment of the uncontainable.
The horse runs free.

So Far So Good
Come to Dust
All earth's dust
has been life, held soul, is holy.

Selected Uncollected Poems
I liked the section on dream poems, where Le Guin tries to recall snippets of poetry that formed in her mind just before drifting off to sleep. I'm very impressed that the second poem she captured had perfect rhymes, even though she claimed she couldn't make sense of the poem's meaning after waking up.

The Crown of Laurel
I looove the imagery of interlaced fingers of a nymph as a laurel nested in the hair of a god!

I love whenever Le Guin was inspired by a random snippet of news she read and wrote a poem about it. Some examples in this section include the one about sea lions saving drowning people and a museum's pompous (and erroneous) display of the platform base of a sculpture instead of the sculpture itself.

Selected Prose About Poetry
First Loves & Preface to Sixty Odd & Afterword to Late in the Day
To Le Guin, there are two kinds of poetry: the kind that tells a story and the kind that moves by rhythm (i.e. words as music), though the best poems often braid the two together until they arrive at the same place. She began as a formalist, writing with strict rules like in sonnets. She found that these structures didn’t just hold the lines in place—they guided the poems' themes as well. When she eventually wandered into free-form, it felt like reinventing poetry with every new draft, reshaping familiar traditions through small deviations. Le Guin even lovingly called her poetry support group the “Poultry Group,” a delightful display of her playfulness.

Foreword to Late in the Day
Here, Le Guin reminds us again that humanity is part of an infinite, complex network, with relations to all things in universe, including animals and "non-living" entities like plants and hills. She also advises us against describing everything in relation to human understanding (e.g. comparing an ape's response to tickling as "human-like"), and instead take things as they are.

Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside, Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.

Conversations on Writing: On Poetry
I appreciate the order of these proses, especially since this interview weaves in Le Guin’s other writings and lectures on poetry, which were placed in prior sections.

Chronology
This is like reading about Le Guin's life story in a snapshot. I didn't realize she was rejected so many times before she was able to successfully publish, even though her father's friend Knopf gave encouraging comments (but still rejected her draft for being too strange). Though this chronology mostly compiled factual statements (e.g. awards, birth and death of family members, residences), it also subtly revealed Le Guin's stances on war, technology, and feminism.

Overall
I'm so glad I worked through this chonky book of collected poems from Le Guin, seeing another side of her that's distinct yet connected to her science fiction persona. The poems are rarely fantastical, but they are rooted in the myths of Nature and ancestry, with rooted philosophical musings. I especially enjoyed her poems (and there are many) on rocks, how they are ancient beings that have persevered through time. On the other side of the spectrum, Le Guin can be incredibly playful, with her drawings of two-headed camels (as a metaphor for palindrome) and poems on cats. I'm most pleasantly surprised by her sudden bursts of obscenity, particularly in poems about unruly women, written with unbridled joy, fierceness, and freedom.

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Birds will perch on leaf and thorn,
silent birds to silence born.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yet I would rather (you too, ghost?) have danced not alone, the word-dance, the rhyming remembering praises, the play of light and surrounding of darkness, feet pounding earth growing firm, resilient: rock in the sunlight planet in sunlight spirit in sunlight hand taking hand in the long dance by the edge of the Ocean.

I don’t think Le Guin had a poetry editor, otherwise this would have been a shorter collection. Some are so good, a flash of insight, an original thought, a lovely vision, mostly her nature poems, but many are strange, and not in a sci fi way she wrote in prose, but just odd and they don’t work and obscure the really good ones.

From my California, my great land of gold and complications, wilderness, enormous cities built on faults, austere, bizarre, and inexhaustible vineyards, valleys crowded with visions, to your Georgia of red dirt farms, where trees are all one green, a bony piny sandy silence, your Georgia of slow rivers, graves, islands, that quiet place, how could I come with all my California? I see them come with open hands, transparent, sharing everything, giving and cleaving, nothing kept, the emigrants that leave their motherland for love and never look behind. But if I would how could I give you California? and I have to live there, working the creeks my veins, the mines. Or could you leave Georgia, leaving your bones behind, and give me more than silence?

We met at sea, married in a foreign language: what wonder if we cross a continent on foot each time to find each other at secret borders bringing of all my streams and darknesses of gold and your deep graves and islands a feather a flake of mica a willow leaf that is our country, ours alone.

The way you can go isn’t the real way. The name you can say isn’t the real name. Heaven and earth begin in the unnamed: name’s the mother of the ten thousand things. So the unwanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants. Two things, one origin, but different in name, whose identity is mystery. Mystery of all mysteries! The door to the hidden.

The smooth-skinned warm rosy quartz that sings the fingers a wonderful geology, this curving maiden came downstream from the snow before mad Columbus, maybe before canoes; she knows enough; so she curves over, blessing the ephemeral in the armless gesture of the sea-borne, the foam-mother.

My daughter’s soul sings three or four hours a day the young soul runs the scales and sings from string to string down the deep cello all down the valleys and whispers with the soul of Bach O and shouts aloud to God and I hear her

Arboreal
The family tree has not got back to trees yet; we uproot and move and lack the steady knowing what is good and living on it, that makes wood. Out of the root arises all the dance. He’s not yet born who will (O high ash-tree, O rowan fair red rowan on the hill) in flower whiten all the air, heir of the whole inheritance…

Smith Creek
Ripples of water quicken rippled mud. Ripples of light run downstream on opal-blue and brownish minnow-depths to flood in foam across a sunken branch. Mica in mud says Sun, staring and shining, but the creek ripples, goes forward, seaward, counting aloud the ten thousand things, carrying heaven downward.

Torrey Pines Reserve
Sandstone is softer than the salty wind; it crumbles, wrinkles, very old, vulnerable. Circles in the rock in hollows worn by ocean long ago. These are eyes that were his pearls. One must walk lightly; this is fragile. Hold to the thread of way. There’s narrow place for us in this high place between the still desert and the stillness of the sea. This gentle wilderness. The Torrey pines grow nowhere else on earth. Listen: you can hear the lizards listening.

My House
I have built a house in Time, my home province. Up in the hills not far from the city, it looks west over fields, vineyards, wild lands to the shore of the Eternal. Many years went to building it as I wanted it to be, the sleeping porches, the shady rooms, the inner gardens with their fountains. Above the front door, a word in a language as yet unknown may perhaps mean Praise. Windows are open to the summer air. In winter rain patters in the courtyards and in the basins of the fountains and gathers to drip from the deep eaves.

Kinship
Very slowly burning, the big forest tree stands in the slight hollow of the snow melted around it by the mild, long heat of its being and its will to be root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song. Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow, tall, fraternal fire of life as strong now as in the seedling two centuries ago.

A Meditation in the Desert
As thought to mind, so to the string plucked, or touched, or bowed, the music is, a wrinkling of the air as immaterial and brief as sunlight glancing on a wave. The silence in these empty lands is long. Voice is as mortal as the word it says, with little time to speak the thought, to tell or sing the quick idea of those who live. So brief the spoken word, the airy thing in which are placed our deepest constancies, though by it love or life may stand or fall, and in it is the power to ruin or save. The silence in these empty lands is long. Rock has no tongue to speak or voice to sing, mute, heavy matter. Yet as I lift up this dull desert stone, the weight of it is full of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have. Be my mind, stone lying on my grave. The silence in these empty lands is long. The stars have long to listen. Be my song.

[Science and Fiction · Rating 3 out of 5]

The biggest problem with this 738 page collection is that there is an awful lot of chaff to get to the edible and nutritious parts. My favorite work is one of her last poems, Finding My Elegy, written in 2012, but even here the quality of the writing is all over the map. True, there are some memorable lines scattered here and there, here are a few of my favorites:

On her eightieth birthday:
Thinking how what I thought was mine
Was only borrowed , and what was dear
Has been forgotten, and every line
I’ve written will be a sign
For nothing at all, given time.
But that’s what I’ was given, time.
That’s my present, present time.

From Finding My Elegy:
Wiped off the earth like mist wiped off a mirror, leaving one
Face, reflection of itself alone.
Image of its imagined image . . .

Most of the hundreds of short poems seem to be an almost stream-of-consciousness manner that usually have a singular idea at the beginning and end which sort of frames the poem (if you look for it). Among these shorter works I think Le Guin does best with those that have the structural imposition of traditional rhyme and meter. Here’s an example which also shows Le Guin’s Taoist leanings:
The Child on the Shore
Wind, wind, give me back my feather
Sea, sea, give me back my ring
Death, death give me back my mother
So that I may sing.
Song, song, go and tell my daughter
Tell her that I wear the ring
Say I fly upon the feather
Fallen from the falcon’s wing.

For me, poetry is an almost intimate kind of communication, so if I struggle to find common ground in how ideas are conveyed it’s just not going to work for me. There are plenty of noted poets that just don’t work for me (E.E. Cummings, for example) who might work for somebody else. We tend to lump all poetry together, but there really is quite a range of style and content, much like different genres in literature. Since poetry is not my area of expertise I can’t give any more objective assessment than that. My suggestion would be to try an anthology of 20th Century poets first, find somebody that resonates with you and then take a deeper dive.

Ursula Le Guin had a fundamentally different view of the world than I do, so I consider it a challenge to try and find some common ground with this highly-regarded writer. Her philosophy was inspired by the indigenous shamanists and Eastern Taoists, and therefore resolutely anti-science and anti-technology; my personal religion is that science and technology will eventually be our salvation if it can be guided by Enlightenment principles. I guess you could give me an “A” for effort in making this attempt, slogging through 738 pages of her poetry, but perhaps a much lower grade for failing to achieve any kind of détente. I’m afraid the gap is just too wide. Still, three stars overall isn’t that bad.

[Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am older than a hero ever gets."

A life of poetry and mind. If you're a fan of Ursula's writing then you'll definitely enjoy this - if you're not you will still probably enjoy quite a few poems.

There's also a great deal of context/notes and a history of the author that brings meaning to a lot of poems that don't strike as hard without them. It's a nitpick I have with other poetry books (especially those that are dated) so I really appreciated the depth in this.

Only nitpick, as others have mentioned, is that this collection is very long, and some poems aren't as striking as others (which I suppose is true of all poetry books) or are just simply a little off-kilter for what you might expect (90% of the Lao Tzu renditions I could have gone without probably).

If you're just interested in the poetry and are not very familiar with the author then I think I would recommend picking up one of her individual poetry books to start with instead.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, how do you read, much less absorb, a lifetime of poetry in 3 weeks?
The introduction was helpful, and the interview transcript at the end was enlightening, as to understanding a little about UKL’s (the author) deep engagement with her writing (of which poetry is only a portion), her spirit and her vast intellect.
I will say I enjoyed the poems from her last book, SO FAR, SO GOOD, but I will need to come back to these poems again and again if I hope to do more than the superficial. A non random sample:

“Over Eighty”
The wire
gets higher
and they forget
the net


A quatrain from
SO FAR, SO GOOD
-In the Ninth Decade-
A collection of poems turned in to her publisher just weeks before her death at age 88.

[Eleanor! · Rating 5 out of 5]

how does one rate a lifetime of poetry? these poems span some of ursula’s earliest written, up to those which she submitted to the press a week before her death. striking, lyrical, powerful—these works are full of glorious imagery, emotion, and not a little humor. there’s a clear development one can trace in how ursula writes, marking the poems of her youth off from those of old age, while being still definitively the voice of a singular poet. nature, memory, and the human relationship to the (more-than-human) world are consistent through-lines, and in her later poems there is often a great sense of melancholy; and yet some of her latest poems are also some of the sweetest, lighthearted, or funny. a wonderful, wise, and utterly inspiring woman.

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt the tears welling inside of me so frequently, I normally am not a fan majorly of poetry minus mary oliver but this was different. Her words captured my spirituality, segments of my consciousness. Hearing her describe parts of Oregon, that I love and loved independently knowing that she too loved them and could describe them in words that encapsulated all the awe and tranquility that I would never be able to conjure. The fact that we may have grieved after the same woman on 23rd street, the fact I almost knew exactly who she was talking about. I kept on putting this down because I wanted to savor it, to do her words justice by reading them when I was in the right headspace. This may become my bible where I carry this novel around with me wherever I go

[Vanjr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely better read aloud than reading silently to oneself.

[Bone Tent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read Ursula K. Le Guin.