So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014-2018

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Overview

"Ursula K. Le Guin, loved by millions for her fantasy and science-fiction novels, ponders life, death and the vast beyond in So Far So Good, an astute, charming collection finished weeks before her death in January, 2018. Fans will recognize some of the motifs here—cats, wind, strong women — as well as her exploration of the intersection between soul and body, the knowable and the unknown. The writing is clear, artful and reverent as Le Guin looks back at key memories and concerns and looks forward to what is next: 'Spirit, rehearse the journey of the body/ that are to come, the motions/ of the matter that held you.'"―Washington Post

"Le Guin’s farewell poetry collection, contains all that created her reputation for fiction—sharp insight, restless imagination, humor that is both mordant and humane, and, above all else, that connection to all creation, that 'immense what is'."—New York Journal of Books

“It’s hard to think of another living author who has written so well for so long in so many styles as Ursula K. Le Guin.” —Salon

“She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is.” —Margaret Atwood

“There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Le Guin’s.” —Grace Paley

Legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin was lauded by millions for her ground- breaking science fiction novels, but she began as a poet, and wrote across genres for her entire career. In this clarifying and sublime collection—completed shortly before her death in 2018—Le Guin is unflinching in the face of mor- tality, and full of wonder for the mysteries beyond. Redolent of the lush natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, with rich sounds playfully echoing myth and nursery rhyme, Le Guin bookends a long, daring, and prolific career.

From “How it Seems to Me”:

In the vast abyss before time, self is not, and soul commingles with mist, and rock, and light. In time, soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self . . .

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of over sixty novels, short fiction works, translations, and volumes of poetry, including the acclaimed novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Her books continue to sell millions of copies worldwide. Le Guin died in 2018 in her home in Portland, Oregon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556595387
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	10/02/2018
Pages:	100
Sales rank:	1,139,481
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of over 60 novels, short fiction works, translations, and volumes of poetry. She is known mostly for her works of science fiction and fantasy, including the acclaimed novels The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed. Le Guin is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, and her books continue to sell millions of copies worldwide. An author of singular imagination and resolve, Le Guin died in 2018 in her home in Portland, Oregon.

Hometown:

Portland, Oregon

Date of Birth:

October 21, 1929

Place of Birth:

Berkeley, California

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe College; M.A., Columbia University, 1952

Website:

http://www.ursulakleguin.com

Read an Excerpt

Words for the Dead







Mouse my cat killed



grey scrap in a dustpan



carried to the trash







To your soul I say:







With none to hide from



run now, dance



within the walls



of the great house







And to your body:







Inside the body



of the great earth



in unbounded being



be still















McCoy Creek: Cattle







Long after sunset the afterlight



glows warm along the rimrock.



A wind down off the mountain



blows soft, a little chill.



I’ve come to love the quiet sound



cattle make cropping short grass.



Day and night are much the same



to them in the pastures of summer,



cows and calves, they crop and pull



with that steady, comfortable sound



as the light in the rimrock and the sky



dims away slowly. Now no wind.



I don’t know if cattle see the stars,



but all night long they graze



and walk and stand in the calm



light that has no shadows.















McCoy Creek: Wind











The wind beats on the drums



of my ears and overturns the chairs,



blowing out of all the years



we’ve come here, been here.







The bird that says tzeep says tzeep.



Dry pods on the old honeylocust rattle.



Barbed wire draws straggling lines between



us and distant cattle.



Rocking like little white sailboats



two hens cross the footbridge.







Behind me and before me



the basalt ridges are silent



as the air is silent when



the wind for a moment ceases.



















SIX QUATRAINS







Autumn







gold of amber



red of ember



brown of umber



all September







McCoy Creek







Over the bright shallows



now no flights of swallows.



Leaves of the sheltering willow



dangle thin and yellow.







October







At four in the morning the west wind



moved in the leaves of the beech tree



with a long rush and patter of water,



first wave of the dark tide coming in.







Solstice







On the longest night of all the year



in the forests up the hill,



the little owl spoke soft and clear



to bid the night be longer still.











The Winds of May







are soft and restless



in their leafy garments



that rustle and sway



making every moment movement











Hail







The dogwood cowered under the thunder



and the lilacs burned like light itself



against the storm-black sky until the hail



whitened the grass with petals.



















Come to Dust







Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body



that are to come, the motions



of the matter that held you.







Rise up in the smoke of palo santo.



Fall to the earth in the falling rain.



Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots.



Mount slowly in the rising sap



to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips.



Come down to earth as leaves in autumn



to lie in the patient rot of winter.



Rise again in spring’s green fountains.



Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen



to fall in blessing.



All earth’s dust



has been life, held soul, is holy.



















Lullaby







where’s my little fleeting cat



a year a year an hour a day



where’s my little girl at



fleeting away sleeping away



found the way clear away



nowhere far nowhere near



a day a day an hour a year















To the Rain







Mother rain, manifold, measureless,



falling on fallow, on field and forest,



on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,



downwelling waters all-washing, wider



than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster



than countrysides, calming, recalling:



return to us, teaching our troubled



souls in your ceaseless descent



to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,



to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.















The Fine Arts







Judging beauty, which is keenest,



Eye or heart or mind or penis?



Lust is blindest, feeling kindest,



Sight is strongest, thought goes wrongest.















An Autumn Reading



for Andrea







The poet read in the Scholar’s Room



in the Chinese garden, her words



half heard in rush and crash of rain



on formal ponds and pavements,



like verses cut in an old stone



blurred by moss and lichen.



Under the downpour purple



chrysanthemums nodded in silence.















A Cento of Scientists







(Alternating quotations from Charles Darwin, Galileo Galilei, and Giordano Bruno)







There is grandeur



The sun with all the circling planets it sustains



God is glorified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest



in this view of life



the sun with all the circling planets yet



glorified not in one but in countless suns



from so simple a beginning endless forms



the sun with all the planets it sustains yet can ripen a bunch of grapes



not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand



endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful



the sun can ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do



not in a single world but in a thousand thousand, an infinity of worlds



endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved



as if it had nothing else in the universe to do



All things are in the universe, and the universe is in all things,



we in it and it in us



There is grandeur in this view of life











How it Seems to Me







In the vast abyss before time, self



is not, and soul commingles



with mist, and rock, and light. In time,



soul brings the misty self to be.



Then slow time hardens self to stone



while ever lightening the soul,



till soul can loose its hold of self



and both are free and can return



to vastness and dissolve in light,



the long light after time.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/20/2018
Reviewed by Peter Milne GreinerFaraway planet, windswept islet—readers of late essayist, novelist, and poet Le Guin (1929–2018) are accustomed to sprawling geographies, sprawling timelines, and sprawling lives. It’s hard to be at home at the edge of creation, where death and oblivion are unmasked as fictions, and harder still to spin any sense from the kinships we sometimes impose on the unknowable. But that has been Le Guin’s game since there were flying lions and gnomes in her novels—you’ll find them if you go back far enough. Poetry is not a secret subplot in the story of her life as a writer, though the dozen or so volumes she published, beginning with 1974’s Wild Angels, are seldom written about and so remain secret-like. So Far So Good concludes Le Guin’s final trilogy (if you will), after the “Life Sciences” section of Finding My Elegy and Late In The Day, and strongly reflects and refracts a life spent dreaming of Earthsea, of action and change, of giving form to mystery, and vice versa. “I am such a long way from my ancestors now/ in my extreme old age that I feel more one of them/ than their descendent,” she writes in “Ancestry,” as if to reprise, in the entanglement of past and future, the opening lines of her 1985 novel Always Coming Home.Throughout all of Le Guin’s poetry, as in much of her fiction, animals talk and shape-shift, rain speaks, the soul and body cross terrestrial paths and then part ways, and the wind is an entropic phenomenon that will outlast modern science. Of the poems assembled in this collection, readers may ask are they nearly as fast as, or faster than, light? They are koan-ical, comical; here a little Dorothy Parker, there a touch Richard Brautigan. And so they are ever-shadowy where objects block the sun, always “bringing the silent desert/ distances back to the heart.” Somewhere in the Oregon high desert an almost-century swept over Le Guin’s championship of American letters, of feminism and anarchism, of the novel, and, of course, cats. Her writings and convictions were driven by a big heart—the heart of a poet who knew all too well the difference between miracle and eureka, revelation and revolution. So Far So Good is here to remind us of that. For work that is so highly mannered and formal, a subject about which Le Guin wrote extensively during her life, these poems are candid in the extreme, casual in the faces of death, funny, glum, reverent, irreverent, certain, uncertain, but never trivial, never an afterthought, never the product of anything other than rigor and discipline and delight in what’s left of the world.Peter Milne Greiner is the author of Lost City Hydrothermal Field (The Operating System, 2017).

Publishers Weekly

Ursula Le Guin has had an extraordinary impact on several generations of readers and, particularly, writers in the United States and around the world. She has shown how great writing will obliterate the antiquated-and never really valid-line between popular and literary art. Her influence will be felt for decades to come. -National Book Foundation citation for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters"Le Guin writes as well as any non-'genre' writer alive." - Zadie Smith"

Le Guin, of course, has long been one of our most powerful writers of conscience." -David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"It's hard to think of another living author who has written so well for so long in so many styles as Ursula K. Le Guin." -Scott Timber, Salon

"She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is." -Margaret Atwood

"Ursula K. Le Guin's prose breathes light and intelligence. She can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory." -Jonathan Lethem

"There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Le Guin's." -Grace Paley

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2018
The January 2018 death of Le Guin was a loss not just for sf and fantasy readers but for American letters; her range included nonfiction and poetry, always unhackneyed and perceptive. Poets, enchanted by the difficulty of language, often work by indirection—humor, irony, surprise—while novelists take pains to convey meaning, even when they write poetry, and Le Guin was of that class, with writers such as May Sarton, Reynolds Price, and Willa Cather. This fine collection, completed shortly before the author's death, exhibits the humane, undeceived warmth of all her writing, including a touching series of elegies to past experience or departed persons and a sequence inspired by the difficult journey of Capt. William Bligh—post-Mutiny on the Bounty—to the island of Timor. Although Le Guin's work does not much resemble the jokey surrealism currently fashionable in poetry, she is excellent company, intelligent and frequently razor-sharp wise. She offers the testimony of a practiced writer with layered insights into old age, as too few have done before her, and we willingly follow her as she threads the "maze whose gate and goal are mystery." VERDICT Le Guin's last completed collection should be accessible to a wide range of readers, including her fiction fans; her keen and eloquent style engages age, memory, nature, time, and perception.—Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

Library Journal