So Far So Good.
Ursula K. Le Guin.
Copper Canyon Press. 2016. 100 pp.
ISBN 978-1-55659-538-7.
My desire was sufficiently velleitious that Le Guin passed away, last January, at the ripe old age of 89 years, without my having realized it or ever having read anything by her. Nor had I ever realized that she published collections of poetry as well.
Having received her posthumous So Far So Good: Final Poems, for review, has given me an excuse to do some little bit of the reading I'd hoped to do over the years. Also to watch some part of the extensive video record of her life available on line.
It was a shock to me that her mother, Theodora Kroeber, wrote the series of books on Ishi, the last of his tribe, the first book of which I still have on my shelves somewhere. Ursula's father Alfred Kroeber had studied the young boy, last of the native American Yahi tribe, as a professional cultural anthropologist. Theodora had begun writing after the last of her children left for college. Like her daughter, she proved to be prolific. Ishi was her most famous subject.
My short course in Le Guin's work has introduced me to a range of delightful poems that seem only to have been published online. Her satirical epigram “On David Hensel's Submission to the Royal Academy of Art” is just plain fun. Her lines on keeping a crow for a pet are uncanny:
Having a pet crow would be
like having Voltaire on a string.
Who would have considered it? Having considered it, who could deny it?
Her final volume, So Far So Good, closes the life's work of a poet who began decades ago as a formalist. She remained one, by and large, to the end while making adjustments to accommodate the times. Still, what is more striking is how little she conceded.
Like most volumes of poetry written by writers from science-related genres, the poems here are almost entirely unschooled. There is no sign of abandon. The best among such writers tend to be strikingly simple in their beauty, but it is the beauty of the world they observe rather than themselves.
the sun can ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do
It tends to be paced at the rate of a life dedicated to order. The dramas tend to be the dramas of self-reflection.
The world may be as it used to be
but I am altered, I the eye that sees
all half known, half strange as if a newborn
and fresh to its mortality.
Such reflection is surely an area of expertise, also, of the octogenarian. She wields it well.
The signs of the MFA are nowhere to be seen. There is regularly rhyme—some of it willfully naïve, much of it irregular. She has cut her poetic teeth on the poems of W. B. Yeats. The word “soul” is offered without irony. Other lesser infractions are indulged in equally without apology.
Her subject matter is more often the humble details of life that intrigue us all. Perhaps the best poetic sequence in the book recounts the voyage of falling asleep. Her preference in sleep partners has become marked.
Cats are less troublesome than lovers.
The reader follows sleep's approach step-by-step, lyric-by-lyric until
it comes unnoticed, so easily.
The poet knows her craft. The spark of recognition—and the sense of pleasure that goes with it—is guaranteed.
Confession is not offered at all. Instead we may find in the story of William Bligh's drifting 4000 miles across the Pacific Ocean the poet's own slow surrender:
I've lost my anger
with the rest I lost.
Negative Capability preceded the stark exhibitionism of confessional poetry as did Le Guin. She has not seen fit to modify her old fashioned modesty.
As might be expected, a mind much more trained to prose and an to earlier age cannot—and cannot want to—apply the tools of post-Modernism or any of the post-post-Modern poetries. The poet of So Far So Good is highly skilled at doing what is no longer appreciated by the practitioners in the field.
At the same time, Ursula K. Le Guin is not so skilled at poetry that she takes a place with the best of the earlier generation of poets. She is one of those poets, one suspects, with whom the reader so easily feels at home that they often prefer her to the marquee names whose work she read in her youth.
Her own mortality is all through these final poems. In the last lines of So Far So Good comes the volume's most fraught, most dramatic moment.
Dark
of evening deepens into night
and the sea becomes sleep.
She very quietly ceases to be.
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