Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems

By Ursula K. Le Guin

This poetry collection by the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author presents selections from across fifty years of verse—plus more than seventy new poems.

Though internationally celebrated for her imaginative fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin started out as a poet, and since 1959 has never ceased to publish poems. Finding My Elegy distills her life's work in verse, offering a selection of the best from her six earlier volumes of poetry as well as powerful new poems written in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The fruit of over a half century of writing, the seventy selected and seventy-seven new poems consider war and creativity, motherhood and the natural world, and glint with humor and vivid beauty. These moving works of art are a reckoning with a whole life.

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9780547858227

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

Book preview

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Wild Fortune Selected Poems, 1960–2005

From Wild Angels (1960–1975)

Offering

A Lament for Rheged

There

Ars Lunga

Song

Tao Song

From Hard Words (1975–1980)

Invocation

The Mind Is Still

The Marrow

The Writer to the Dancer

From The Dancing at Tillai

Middle

At Three Rivers, April ’80

Slick Rock Creek, September

Winter Downs

Peak

The Child on the Shore

Tui

From Wild Oats and Fireweed (1980–1987)

Wild Oats and Fireweed

From In the Red Zone: Mount St. Helens, October 1981

To Walk In Here

While the Old Men Make Ready to Kill

For the New House

The Maenads

Inventory

A Meditation on a Marriage

From Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987)

The Crown of Laurel

From Going Out with Peacocks (1988–1994)

The Pacific Slope

Riding the Coast Starlight

Sleeping with Cats

Waking: Two Poems

The Vigil for Ben Linder

The Queen of Spain, Grown Old and Mad, Writes to the Daughter She Imagines She Had by Christopher Columbus

Song for a Daughter

The Hard Dancing

From No Boats (chapbook, 1991)

From McKenzie Voices

At Cannon Beach

From Blue Moon over Thurman Street (1993)

The Aching Air

From Sixty Odd (1994–1999)

Read at the Award Dinner, May 1996

Hexagram 45

When there aren’t any

Rodmell

For Gabriela Mistral

Hexagram 49

Infinitive

The scarcity of rhinos on the television

FIELD BURNING DEBATED, SALMON FATE DISCUSSED.

Morning Service

Late Dusk

A Blue Moon: June 30

Repulse Monkey

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

From Incredible Good Fortune (2000–2006)

Incredible Good Fortune

April in San Jose

Mount Rainier from Amtrak

The Cactus Wren

A Book of Songs

The Old Lady

The Forsaken Shepherdess

Notes from a Cruise

Antigua: The Silence of the Mountain

Pelicans

Talk Shows

Here, There, at the Marsh

American Wars

The Lost Explorer

Ille

Invocation

Dance Song

English

Taking Courage

A Request

For Naomi

Learning Latin in Old Age

Futurology

Life Sciences New Poems, 2006–2010

I. Socioesthetics

Distance

Pretty Things

In England in the Fifties

The City of the Plain

Watching the Fractal Set

The Mistake

The Next War

The Crest

Soldiers

The Curse of the Prophetess

Every Land

The Elders at the Falls

An Old Yurok Basket

Almost and Always

Lieder Singer

Writers

After the Fire

Lorca’s Duende

Meters

Exegi monumentum aere perennius

She Remembers the Famous Poets

II. Botany and Zoology

Two Crow Poems

Learning the Name

The Greater Forest

Red Alders in March

Pinus Sabiniana

Creation of the Horse

The Clydesdale Mare

I think of them

Grace

Raksha

At the Clackamas County Fair

Extinction

III. Meteorology and Geography

Mendenhall Glacier

A Measure of Desolation

Coast Range Highway, November

Seasonal Quatrains

Morning in Joseph, Oregon

Hour of the Changes

Summer Morning on the Volcano

For My Traveling Companion

Up the Columbia

Navna: The River-running, by Intrumo of Sinshan

At Kishamish

IV. Developmental Ontology

At the Center

Early Memory: Jocken

The Merchant of Words

Stammersong

GPS

The House Is Soft

Seven Lines to Elisabeth

Final Destination

Ghazal at the Oasis of Mara

Travel

Pillowtalk

Low Barometer

My Birthday Present

The Arts of Old Age

Sometimes it seems

The Body of the World

When They Came

Hindsight

Body of Water

Aubade

Votum

V. Philosophy and Theology

Finding My Elegy

The Whirlwind

Intimations

Some Mornings

In the Borderlands

Jewel and Gravel

Science

Tout rêve . . .

Morning Star

Uncaged

A God I Know

January Night Prayer

The Conference

Index of First Lines

Read More from Ursula K. Le Guin

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. LeGuin

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Le Guin, Ursula K., date.

Finding my elegy : new and selected poems 1960–2010 / Ursula K. Le Guin.

 p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-85820-3

I. Title.

PS3562.E42F55 2012

811'.54—dc23 2012016363

Jacket design by Kayleigh McCann

Cover photograph © Visuals Unlimited, Inc./Patrick Smith

Author photograph © Marion Wood Kolisch

eISBN 978-0-547-85822-7

v2.0218

All of the poems in Part I and some poems in Part II previously appeared in the following books: Wild Angels (Capra, 1974). Tillai and Tylissos (chapbook, with Theodora Kroeber; Red Bull, 1979). Hard Words (Harper & Row, 1981). In the Red Zone (chapbook, with Henk Pander; Lord John, 1983). Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (Capra, 1987). Wild Oats and Fireweed (Harper & Row, 1988). No Boats (chapbook; Ygor & Buntho Make Books Press, 1991). Blue Moon over Thurman Street (with Roger Dorband; NewSage, 1993). Going Out with Peacocks (HarperCollins, 1994). Sixty Odd (Shambhala, 1999). Incredible Good Fortune (Shambhala, 2007). Four Different Poems (chapbook; Longhouse, 2007). The Wild Girls (PM Press, 2011).

The following poems first appeared in these publications: Amicus Journal (1991): Riding the ‘Coast Starlight.’ Attic (2003): The Lost Explorer, A Measure of Desolation. Breaking Waves/Book View Café (2003): In England in the Fifties. Calapooya Collage (1991): The Pacific Slope. Cream City Review (1993): The Queen of Spain . . . Grove Review (2003): Here, There, at the Marsh. International Dream Quarterly (1993): Waking: Two Poems. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (2003): Watching the Fractal Set. Milkweed Chronicle (1987): Inventory. Moral Ground/Trinity University Press (2011): The Conference (as The Conference of Time). Northwest Review (2007): Finding My Elegy. Off the Coastal Path/Stanza Press (2010): Creation of the Horse. Open Places (#33, 1982): Wild Oats and Fireweed. Oregon Environmental Council newsletter: Coast Range Highway. Oregon Literary Review (2006): At the Clackamas County Fair (as Sapphics at the Clackamas County Fair), Diamond Gravel (as Diamond Gravel Dialogue). Papers, Inc. (1974): Tao Song (as Tao Poem). Peace and Freedom (2009): Curse of the Prophetess. Ploughshares (2010): Hour of the Changes, Votum. PoetryMagazine.com (2003): Talk Shows. Poets Against the War (2003): American Wars. Portland Review (2010): The Greater Forest. Realms of Fantasy (2011): Distance, Mendenhall Glacier. Stone Telling (2011): The Elders at the Falls. Villanelle/Modern Library (2012): Extinction. Windfall: "At Kishamish (11 poems; 2011), Red Alders in March" (2008). Women’s International League for Peace

Reviews for Finding My Elegy

[thealternativeone · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems Ursula K. Le Guin Trade Paperback 208 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publication Date: September 18, 2012 ISBN-13: 978-0547858203 Advance Reader’s Copy – Uncorrected Proof In her eighty-third year Ursula K. Le Guin may very well be searching for her own elegy but her newest collection of poetry is by no means a swan song. If we define elegy as a funeral song or dirge then perhaps Ms. Le Guin has published Finding My Elegy as a memento for future generations. I think this extremely unlikely, however. In fact, if we define elegy as a composition of poetry (it’s sister meaning) then I believe Ms. Le Guin, as seasoned a writer as she is, simply continues her writing process by searching for her own unique, poetic voice. Only a true poet would carry on the quest for lyrical inspiration well into their eighth decade. The muse is a moving target and as every writer knows that voice, the essence, is always in motion and must forever be pursued. It can never be accepted as is since it is evolving, ever-changing, and frail to the touch. There’s no question that Ursula K. Le Guin is one of our most gifted authors and while I have always appreciated and loved her body of fiction I know that it takes a certain amount of courage, even by an established legend, to write and publish poetry. Those singular glimpses into the personality and soul, however fleeting, is something most writers would rather not expose. I wish other celebrated Science Fiction writers would follow suit. What would the biggest names in the genre today have to say in the short poetic form I wonder? Mieville, Hill, Gaiman, Atwood, Scalzi, Walton, Stephenson, et al. consider that a challenge, if you will. What might we have learned if Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, or Pohl had written poetry from their distinctive perspectives? I for one want to thank you, Ms. Le Guin, for your thought-provoking work, your daring, and for giving us your little book of collected poetry and for providing us a much too-short glimpse into your heart of hearts.4 ½ out of 5 starsThe Alternative Southeast Wisconsin