Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems (LOA #368)
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
