PLEASE NOTE: This ISBN is for both the hardback and NEW paperback edition of Finding My Elegy. Original review is on Amazon and also here:
http://tracymarks.typepad.com/literati/
With childlike wonder, celebration and grief, Le Guin sings......
This review is for Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems (paperback) by Ursula Le Guin
The first half of FINDING MY ELEGY should be read outside in a field of daisies and sunflowers, while sparrows chirp overhead, and the late afternoon sun radiates its golden light across the dancing pages.
Many of these poems are magical - often childlike and simplistic, occasionally referring to a private world which you, the reader, may not always be able to enter. What matters here, however, is being able to experience the state of wondrous innocence and illumination that Le Guin has also been able to invoke in many of her fantasy novels.
For forty years, I've regarded Ursula Le Guin's A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA as my favorite novel, its message of owning one's shadow having deeply impacted my life ever since. But I had never read her poetry, and was delighted to be able to review her latest book of poems. I was not disappointed, although I found this collection to be inconsistent - inferior poems scattered like dime store glitter among polished jewels.
Also diverse is her subject matter - invocations and prayers, the experience of children, and of fantasy characters and mythical figures. Poems celebrating nature in all of its seasons, California and Oregon, pets and wild animals. Reflections on the artifice of Las Vegas and the enslavement of owning. Poems about silence, language, writers, singers, historical persons. Marriage poems, and poems about daughters and granddaughters. Powerfully moving poems on the evils of war. A multiplicity of poems about aging and approaching death.
FINDING MY ELEGY is indeed a cornucopia of styles (rhymed and unrhymed) and subjects, expressing a full range of voices, from the childlike, magical and celebratory to the maternal, grief-stricken and poignantly reflective.
"Through the mockingbird morning
I make my way bewildered
in the city of ruined men,"
Le Guin writes. In another stanza, she tells us:
"Above all beware of honoring women artists.
For the housewife will fill the house with lions
and in with the grandmother
come bears, wild horses, great horned owls, coyotes."
SONG FOR A DAUGHTER ends with:
"Granddaughter of my mothers,
listen to my song:
Nothing you do will ever be right,
nothing you do is wrong."
Undoubtedly I ask less of Ursula Le Guin than may writers in terms of consistency in quality because I've carried her writing in my heart for so many decades. Indeed, I would have been content if only half a dozen of her poems moved me. But I noted several dozen which speak to me deeply and attest to the true value of this collection.
Le Guin's simplicity is often deceptive, her message more profound than initially it may appear. Consider for example, a few lines from her poem, EVERY LAND, which follows a poem about Israel and Palestine:
Willow by the water bending in the wind
Bent till it's broken and it cannot stand
Listen to the word the messengers send
Life from the living rock, death in the sand
Every land is the holy land.
As a poet, Ursula Le Guin speaks from shining soul to shining soul.
http://tracymarks.typepad.com/literati/
With childlike wonder, celebration and grief, Le Guin sings......
This review is for Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems (paperback) by Ursula Le Guin
The first half of FINDING MY ELEGY should be read outside in a field of daisies and sunflowers, while sparrows chirp overhead, and the late afternoon sun radiates its golden light across the dancing pages.
Many of these poems are magical - often childlike and simplistic, occasionally referring to a private world which you, the reader, may not always be able to enter. What matters here, however, is being able to experience the state of wondrous innocence and illumination that Le Guin has also been able to invoke in many of her fantasy novels.
For forty years, I've regarded Ursula Le Guin's A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA as my favorite novel, its message of owning one's shadow having deeply impacted my life ever since. But I had never read her poetry, and was delighted to be able to review her latest book of poems. I was not disappointed, although I found this collection to be inconsistent - inferior poems scattered like dime store glitter among polished jewels.
Also diverse is her subject matter - invocations and prayers, the experience of children, and of fantasy characters and mythical figures. Poems celebrating nature in all of its seasons, California and Oregon, pets and wild animals. Reflections on the artifice of Las Vegas and the enslavement of owning. Poems about silence, language, writers, singers, historical persons. Marriage poems, and poems about daughters and granddaughters. Powerfully moving poems on the evils of war. A multiplicity of poems about aging and approaching death.
FINDING MY ELEGY is indeed a cornucopia of styles (rhymed and unrhymed) and subjects, expressing a full range of voices, from the childlike, magical and celebratory to the maternal, grief-stricken and poignantly reflective.
"Through the mockingbird morning
I make my way bewildered
in the city of ruined men,"
Le Guin writes. In another stanza, she tells us:
"Above all beware of honoring women artists.
For the housewife will fill the house with lions
and in with the grandmother
come bears, wild horses, great horned owls, coyotes."
SONG FOR A DAUGHTER ends with:
"Granddaughter of my mothers,
listen to my song:
Nothing you do will ever be right,
nothing you do is wrong."
Undoubtedly I ask less of Ursula Le Guin than may writers in terms of consistency in quality because I've carried her writing in my heart for so many decades. Indeed, I would have been content if only half a dozen of her poems moved me. But I noted several dozen which speak to me deeply and attest to the true value of this collection.
Le Guin's simplicity is often deceptive, her message more profound than initially it may appear. Consider for example, a few lines from her poem, EVERY LAND, which follows a poem about Israel and Palestine:
Willow by the water bending in the wind
Bent till it's broken and it cannot stand
Listen to the word the messengers send
Life from the living rock, death in the sand
Every land is the holy land.
As a poet, Ursula Le Guin speaks from shining soul to shining soul.
