So far so good Final poems: 2014-2018

Reviewed by Peter Milne Greiner. Faraway planet, windswept islet-readers of late essayist, novelist, and poet Le Guin (1929-2018) are accustomed to sprawling geographies, sprawling timelines, and sprawling lives. It's hard to be at home at the edge of creation, where death and oblivion are unmasked as fictions, and harder still to spin any sense from the kinships we sometimes impose on the unknowable. But that has been Le Guin's game since there were flying lions and gnomes in her novels-you'll find them if you go back far enough. Poetry is not a secret subplot in the story of her life as a writer, though the dozen or so volumes she published, beginning with 1974's Wild Angels, are seldom written about and so remain secret-like. So Far So Good concludes Le Guin's final trilogy (if you will), after the "Life Sciences" section of Finding My Elegy and Late In The Day, and strongly reflects and refracts a life spent dreaming of Earthsea, of action and change, of giving form to mystery, and vice versa. "I am such a long way from my ancestors now/ in my extreme old age that I feel more one of them/ than their descendent," she writes in "Ancestry," as if to reprise, in the entanglement of past and future, the opening lines of her 1985 novel Always Coming Home. Throughout all of Le Guin's poetry, as in much of her fiction, animals talk and shape-shift, rain speaks, the soul and body cross terrestrial paths and then part ways, and the wind is an entropic phenomenon that will outlast modern science. Of the poems assembled in this collection, readers may ask are they nearly as fast as, or faster than, light? They are koan-ical, comical; here a little Dorothy Parker, there a touch Richard Brautigan. And so they are ever-shadowy where objects block the sun, always "bringing the silent desert/ distances back to the heart." Somewhere in the Oregon high desert an almost-century swept over Le Guin's championship of American letters, of feminism and anarchism, of the novel, and, of course, cats. Her writings and convictions were driven by a big heart-the heart of a poet who knew all too well the difference between miracle and eureka, revelation and revolution. So Far So Good is here to remind us of that. For work that is so highly mannered and formal, a subject about which Le Guin wrote extensively during her life, these poems are candid in the extreme, casual in the faces of death, funny, glum, reverent, irreverent, certain, uncertain, but never trivial, never an afterthought, never the product of anything other than rigor and discipline and delight in what's left of the world. Peter Milne Greiner is the author of Lost City Hydrothermal Field (The Operating System, 2017). © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The January 2018 death of Le Guin was a loss not just for sf and fantasy readers but for American letters; her range included non-fiction and poetry, always unhackneyed and perceptive. Poets, enchanted by the difficulty of language, often work by indirection-humor, irony, surprise-while novelists take pains to convey meaning, even when they write poetry, and Le Guin was of that class, with writers such as May Sarton, Reynolds Price, and Willa Cather. This fine collection, completed shortly before the author's death, exhibits the humane, undeceived warmth of all her writing, including a touching series of elegies to past experience or departed persons and a sequence inspired by the difficult journey of Capt. William Bligh-post-Mutiny on the Bounty-to the island of Timor. Although Le Guin's work does not much resemble the jokey surrealism currently fashionable in poetry, she is excellent company, intelligent and frequently razor-sharp wise. She offers the testimony of a practiced writer with layered insights into old age, as too few have done before her, and we willingly follow her as she threads the "maze whose gate and goal are mystery." VERDICT Le Guin's last completed collection should be accessible to a wide range of readers, including her fiction fans; her keen and eloquent style engages age, memory, nature, time, and perception.-Graham -Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Words for the Dead Mouse my cat killed grey scrap in a dustpan carried to the trash. To your soul I say: With none to hide from run now, dance within the walls of the great house. And to your body: Inside the body of the great earth in unbounded being be stil lMcCoy Creek: Cattle Long after sunset the afterlight glows warm along the rimrock.A wind down off the mountain blows soft, a little chill. I've come to love the quiet sound cattle make cropping short grass. Day and night are much the same to them in the pastures of summer, cows and calves, they crop and pull with that steady, comfortable sound as the light in the rimrock and the sky dims away slowly. Now no wind. I don't know if cattle see the stars, but all night long they graze and walk and stand in the calm light that has no shadows. McCoy Creek: Wind The wind beats on the drums of my ears and over turns the chairs, blowing out of all the years we've come here, been here. The bird that says tzeep says tzeep. Dry pods on the old honey locust rattle. Barbed wire draws straggling lines between us and distant cattle. Rocking like little white sail boats two hens cross the footbridge. Behind me and before me the basalt ridges are silentas the air is silent whenthe wind for a moment ceases. SIX QUATRAINS Autumn gold of amber red of ember brown of umber all September McCoy Creek Over the bright shallows now no flights of swallows. Leaves of the sheltering willow dangle thin and yellow. October At four in the morning the west wind moved in the leaves of the beech tree with a long rush and patter of water, first wave of the dark tide coming in. Solstice On the longest night of all the yearin the forests up the hill, the little owl spoke soft and clear to bid the night be longer still. The Winds of May are soft and restless in their leafy garments that rustle and sway making every moment movement. Hail The dogwood cowered under the thunder and the lilacs burned like light itself against the storm-black sky until the hail whitened the grass with petals. Come to Dust Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body that are to come, the motions of the matter that held you. Rise up in the smoke of palo santo. Fall to the earth in the falling rain. Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots. Mount slowly in the rising sapto the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips. Come down to earth as leaves in autumn to lie in the patient rot of winter. Rise again in spring's green fountains. Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollento fall in blessing. All earth's dust has been life, held soul, is holy. Lullaby where's my little fleeting cat a year a year an hour a day where's my little girl at fleeting away sleeping away found the way clear away nowhere far nowhere near a day a day an hour a year. To the Rain Mother rain, manifold, measureless, falling on fallow, on field and forest,on house-roof, low hovel, high tower, down welling waters all-washing, wider than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster than countrysides, calming, recalling: return to us, teaching our troubled souls in your ceaseless descent to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root, to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea. The Fine Arts Judging beauty, which is keenest, Eye or heart or mind or penis?Lust is blindest, feeling kindest, Sight is strongest, thought goes wrongest. An Autumn Reading for Andrea The poet read in the Scholar's Roomin the Chinese garden, her words half heard in rush and crash of rain on formal ponds and pavements, like verses cut in an old stone blurred by moss and lichen. Under the down pour purple chrysanthemums nodded in silence. A Cento of Scientists (Alternating quotations from Charles Darwin, Galileo Galilei, and Giordano Bruno) There is grandeur. The sun with all the circling planets it sustains God is glorified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest in this view of life the sun with all the circling planets yet glorified not in one but in countless suns from so simple a beginning endless forms the sun with all the planets it sustains yet can ripen a bunch of grapes not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful the sun can ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do not in a single world but in a thousand thousand, an infinity of worlds endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved as if it had nothing else in the universe to do All things are in the universe, and the universe is in all things, we in it and it in us There is grandeur in this view of life. How it Seems to Me In the vast abyss before time, self is not, and soul commingles with mist, and rock, and light. In time, soul brings the misty self to be. Then slow time hardens self to stone while ever lightening the soul, till soul can loose its hold of self and both are free and can return to vastness and dissolve in light, the long light after time. Excerpted from So Far, So Good: Poems 2014-2018 by Ursula K. Le Guin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.