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Overview
Though internationally celebrated for her imaginative fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin started out as a poet, and since 1959 has never ceased to publish poems. Finding My Elegy distills her life's work in verse, offering a selection of the best from her six earlier volumes of poetry as well as powerful new poems written in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The fruit of over a half century of writing, the seventy selected and seventy-seven new poems consider war and creativity, motherhood and the natural world, and glint with humor and vivid beauty. These moving works of art are a reckoning with a whole life.
"She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is.” —Margaret Atwood
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547858227 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 03/19/2021 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 475,113 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
URSULA K. LE GUIN was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, and passed away in Portland, Oregon, in 2018. She published over sixty books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature, and translation. She was the recipient of a National Book Award, six Hugo and five Nebula awards, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Hometown:
Portland, OregonDate of Birth:
October 21, 1929Place of Birth:
Berkeley, CaliforniaEducation:
B.A., Radcliffe College; M.A., Columbia University, 1952Website:
http://www.ursulakleguin.comRead an Excerpt
From Wild Angels (1960–1975)
Offering
I made a poem going
to sleep last night, woke
in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.
If it was any good, gods
of the great darkness
where sleep goes and farther
death goes, you not named,
then as true offering
accept it.
The Maenads
Somewhere I read
that when they finally staggered off the mountain
into some strange town, past drunk,
hoarse, half naked, blear-eyed,
blood dried under broken nails
and across young thighs,
but still jeering and joking, still trying
to dance, lurching and yelling, but falling
dead asleep by the market stalls,
sprawled helpless, flat out, then
middle-aged women,
respectable housewives,
would come and stand nightlong in the agora
silent
together
as ewes and cows in the night fields,
guarding, watching them
as their mothers
watched over them.
And no man
dared
that fierce decorum.
From A Book of Songs
The Old Lady
I have dreed my dree, I have wooed my wyrd,
and now I shall grow a five-foot beard
and braid it into tiny braids
and wander where the webfoot wades
among the water’s shining blades.
I will fear nothing I have feared.
I’m the queen of spades, the jack of trades,
braiding my knives into my beard.
Why should I know what I have known?
Once was enough to make it my own.
The things I got I will forget.
I’ll knot my beard into a net
and cast the net and catch a fish
who will ungrant my every wish
and leave me nothing but a stone
on the riverbed alone,
leave me nothing but a rock
where the feet of herons walk.
Creation of the Horse
The salt green uncle-god, the Earthquaker,
thought of a creature with muscles like sea-swells
to leap across the beaches like a breaker
and beat on the earth like the waves with its feet.
So he struck a startled island with his trident
and then himself stood back in surprise
at the fiery uprearing, the white mane flying,
the foam-spattered flanks and the earth-dark eyes.
The Arts of Old Age
written in the airport
I learn the arts of old age day by day:
the expertise of being lame; the sense
of unimpatient impotence;
the irony of all accomplishments;
the silent, furtive welcome of delay.
The Whirlwind
Will fear of the foreboding dream
avert or invite the prophecy?
How to foretell the paths of dust
caught in this visionary whirl,
this standing wind, this spiral stream?
A breath breathed out will set me free.
I’ll choose to do the thing I must.
The world dreamed me, I dream the world.
January Night Prayer
Bellchimes jangle, freakish wind
whistles icy out of desert lands
over the mountains. Janus, Lord
of winter and beginnings, riven
and shaken, with two faces,
watcher at the gates of winds and cities,
god of the wakeful:
keep me from coldhanded envy
and petty anger. Open
my soul to the vast
dark places. Say to me, say again,
nothing is taken, only given.
Table of Contents
Wild Fortune: Selected Poems, 1960–2005
From Wild Angels (1960–1975) 15
Offering 15
A Lament for Rheged 16
There 19
Ars Lunga 21
Song 22
Tao Song 23
From Hard Words (1975–1980) 24
Invocation 24
The Mind Is Still 25
The Marrow 26
The Writer to the Dancer 27
From The Dancing at Tillai 28
Middle 28
At Three Rivers, April ’80 29
Slick Rock Creek, September 30
Winter Downs 31
Peak 32
The Child on the Shore 34
Tui 35
From Wild Oats and Fireweed (1980–1987) 36
Wild Oats and Fireweed 36
From In the Red Zone: Mount St. Helens, October 1981 39
To Walk In Here 39
While the Old Men Make Ready to Kill 41
For the New House 43
The Maenads 44
Inventory 45
A Meditation on a Marriage 47
From Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987) 49
The Crown of Laurel 49
From Going Out with Peacocks (1988–1994) 53
The Pacific Slope 53
Riding the “Coast Starlight” 54
Sleeping with Cats 55
Waking: Two Poems 56
The Vigil for Ben Linder 57
The Queen of Spain, Grown Old and Mad, Writes to the Daughter She Imagines She Had by Christopher Columbus 60
Song for a Daughter 62
The Hard Dancing 64
From No Boats (chapbook, 1991) 65
From “McKenzie Voices” 65
At Cannon Beach 66
From Blue Moon Over Thurman Street (1993) 67
The Aching Air 67
From Sixty Odd (1994–1999) 70
Read at the Award Dinner, May 1996 70
Hexagram 45 71
When there aren’t any 72
Rodmell 74
For Gabriela Mistral 75
Hexagram 49 77
Infinitive 78
“The scarcity of rhinos” on the television 79
Field Burning Debated, Salmon Fate Discussed 81
Morning Service 82
Late Dusk 83
A Blue Moon: June 30 84
Repulse Monkey 85
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” 86
From Incredible Good Fortune (2000–2006) 87
Incredible Good Fortune 87
April in San Jose 88
Mount Rainier from Amtrak 90
The Cactus Wren 91
From A Book of Songs 92
The Old Lady 92
The Forsaken Shepherdess 93
From Notes from a Cruise 94
Antigua: The Silence of the Mountain 94
Pelicans 95
Talk Shows 96
Here, There, at the Marsh 97
American Wars 98
The Lost Explorer 99
Ille 100
Invocation 101
Dance Song 102
English 103
Taking Courage 104
A Request 105
For Naomi 106
Learning Latin in Old Age 107
Futurology 108
Life Sciences: New Poems, 2006–2011
I. Socioesthetics 111
Distance 111
Pretty Things 112
In England in the Fifties 113
The City of the Plain 114
Watching the Fractal Set 115
The Mistake 116
The Next War 117
The Crest 118
Soldiers 119
The Curse of the Prophetess 122
Every Land 124
The Elders at the Falls 125
An Old Yurok Basket 127
Almost and Always 128
Lieder Singer 129
Writers 130
After the Fire 131
Lorca’s Duende 132
Meters 133
Exegi monumentum aere perennius 135
She Remembers the Famous Poets 136
II. Botany and Zoology 137
Two Crow Poems 137
Learning the Name 138
The Greater Forest 139
Red Alders in March 140
Pinus Sabiniana 141
Creation of the Horse 143
The Clydesdale Mare 144
I think of them 145
Grace 146
Raksha 147
At the Clackamas County Fair 150
Extinction 151
III. Meteorology and Geography 152
Mendenhall Glacier 152
A Measure of Desolation 153
Coast Range Highway, November 154
Seasonal Quatrains 156
Morning in Joseph, Oregon 157
Hour of the Changes 158
Summer Morning on the Volcano 159
For My Traveling Companion 160
Up the Columbia 161
Navna: The River-running, by Intrumo of Sinshan 162
At Kishamish 163
IV. Developmental Ontology 168
At the Center 168
Early Memory: Jocken 169
The Merchant of Words 170
Stammersong 172
GPS 173
The House Is Soft 174
Seven Lines to Elisabeth 175
Final Destination 176
Ghazal at the Oasis of Mara 177
Travel 178
Pillowtalk 179
Low Barometer 180
My Birthday Present 181
The Arts of Old Age 182
Sometimes it seems 183
The Body of the World 184
When They Came 185
Hindsight 186
Body of Water 187
Aubade 188
Votum 189
V. Philosophy and Theology 190
Finding My Elegy 190
The Whirlwind 193
Intimations 194
Some Mornings 195
In the Borderlands 196
Jewel and Gravel 197
Science 199
Tout rêve . . . 200
Morning Star 201
Uncaged 202
A God I Know 203
January Night Prayer 204
The Conference 205