Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems

by Ursula Le Guin

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 196
Rating:

Synopsis:

Though internationally known and honored 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, offering a selection of the best from her six earlier volumes of poetry and introducing a powerful group of poems, at once earthy and transcendent, 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.

Because it’s a collection containing both selected older poems and newer poems, Ursula Le Guin’s Finding My Elegy is kind of difficult to evaluate. It’s not quite simply an overview of her poetry over the decades, nor a new collection; themes and evolution of style are all mingled.

So I’ll stick with my gut reaction, which was that I wouldn’t always have chosen those particular poems over others of hers, but they all have an essential “Le Guin”-ness in the choice of themes and images. I’m not sure I’d identify them all as Le Guin’s work if unlabelled, but being told they’re Le Guin’s makes absolute sense. Her concerns in her poetry are similar to her concerns in her writing, and I wonder if you can match them up, poetry-to-fiction, watching her think through the same things at the same time in two different media…

Anyway, I don’t love Le Guin as a poet, compared to how I feel about her fiction; not all of the poems really speak to me. Sometimes it’s just three lines here or there, a stanza, more rarely a whole poem (and often the shortish ones).

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)