Ursula K. Le Guin is known as the Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of science fiction and fantasy novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven and the ambitious Earthsea series. She has also been writing and publishing poetry--11 books and chapbooks since the 1960s, which she draws upon for the retrospective Finding My Elegy. The wistful, pensive title is taken from one of several new poems that also appear in the collection, in which she tells us "my search" for an elegy "must be a watch,/ patiently sitting, looking out the open door."
The titles of many poems invoke the Pacific Northwest landscape Le Guin has grown to love: the Columbia River, Mount Rainier, the Coast Range Highway, Cannon Beach, Clackamas and on and on. She also writes of her love for the old poets--Virgil, Dante, Lucretius, Shelley, Hugo. In "She Remembers the Famous Poets," she writes: "Now I am old and grey and sit alone beside my fire,/ I think of lovely boys I knew when I was young and fair." And in the witty "Heroic Couplet," we find: "In adolescent tides of fear and hope, / I prized the canny certainties of Pope;/ when all I did seemed wrong, it was delight/ to hear him say, Whatever is, is right."
There are a number of gems in this collection, including "The Queen of Spain, Grown Old and Mad, Writes to the Daughter She Imagines She Had by Christopher Columbus," "The Elders at the Falls," "For the New House" and the just about perfect short poem, "Pelicans," with its wistful echo of Hopkins:
They're awkward, angular, abstruse,
the great beak on a head so narrow,
a kind of weird Jurassic goose
lurching into the modern era.
But the blue arc of sky lets loose--
look, now!--the brown, unerring arrow!
And see how beautiful, how grave,
the steady wings along the wave.
The only thing missing from this superb collection is a few of Le Guin's translations of poets like Lao Tzu and Gabriela Mistral, the first (and only) Latin American woman poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Le Guin has written, "It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end." The poems in Finding My Elegy help chart her journey. --Tom Lavoie
Shelf Talker: Ursula K. Le Guin looks back on her substantial poetic career, while offering a burst of many new poems.