URSULA K. LE GUIN & HER COHORT
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), daughter of a writer and an anthropologist, was born in Berkeley, California. After an education in the East (Radcliffe ‘51, Columbia M.A. in French ‘52, post-graduate work), travel and study in France, marriage to Charles Le Guin in 1953, she and her husband moved to Portland, Oregon in 1959. There they remained and raised a family, and there Ursula would die in January 2018. Over a five-decade writing career, however, Ursula would travel the universe, travel time, and travel into worlds of her creation that would shape worlds in other writers’ and readers’ hearts and minds for generations. She wrote short stories, poetry, novels, essays, and writing guides. She translated the Tao and other works. She wrote introductions to classics being revived, to works of foreign writers who she wanted known in the English-language market. She gave commencement addresses and award acceptances that made international news. She wrote letters of commendation, endorsement, protest, activism. She thrived as an anarchist, a lover of cats, a mentor to writers.
Ursula wrote with a graceful clarity. She was observant in a glancing and peripheral way, reporting to the reader not only what happened but more importantly why it happened and what it meant and what reverberations may ensue, all of this simultaneously. Her writing is not dense, but it is so fluid, so mercury-like, so Taoist in its course over and through barriers, that second and third (and lifetime) re-readings are productive. She is simply one of the best writers of her century, and the list of other writers influenced by her is too long to elaborate, but you may begin with J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon and Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell and Iain Banks.
Be prepared to be surprised. Be prepared to be re-taught how to understand the world. Le Guin was a remarkable artist, and her legacy is to entertain, to provoke, to bless, to confound, and to inspire those fortunate enough to read her.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems [Library of America]
Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems [Library of America]
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.