Ursula K. Le Guin

Starred review from July 24, 2023
Celebrated novelist Le Guin (1929–2018) receives a posthumous spotlight on her expansive poetic oeuvre in this excellent volume. Bloom’s thoughtful introduction traces the influence of Taoism in her poems, highlighting recurring themes of elegy, nature, and desire, and drawing useful parallels between Le Guin’s poems and her prose works. As Bloom notes, “In Le Guin’s poetry as in her fiction, not only a violated earth cries out but all its victims—humans, animals, forests, individual trees—lamenting the lull that seems final.” Early poems capture her elegiac sensibility: “Do you see: there where his absence/ stands by each tree waiting for nightfall,/ where shadows are his being gone.” Seemingly simple verse forms evoke Le Guin’s playful engagement with lyricism and reveal haunting depths, as in the poem “Extinction,” which concludes, “the ocean’s arc/ is bare again/ above the dark,/ the sunken ark.” The stark images in later poems capture a political outlook that is mournful yet undaunted: “the ghost of a jaguar walks through the fence/ the jaguar is our freedom.” This imaginative and insightful collection is a worthy tribute to the poetic life’s work of an important American writer.