Really enjoyed this book of poetry that is varied in form and subject. I particularly liked the reflections on nature and looking back on life at an advanced age. ( )

Coincidentally, I am reading [b:The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition|38459780|The Books of Earthsea The Complete Illustrated Edition|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1526525225s/38459780.jpg|64676657] by [a:Ursula K. Le Guin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg] when I came across this little volume on the poetry shelf of the new book area of our library. It had me intrigued. I knew she wrote poetry, as well, but have never read any, just like I have only read her fantasy novels but never any of her science fiction. This is weird for me because I was as much an avid science fiction reader back in the day as I was a fantasy reader but I only seem to have read some of her short stories from the Hainish series but never any of the full length novels.

Her poetry reads a lot like Mary Oliver to me. She focuses on nature, being out in the natural world, especially near and around her home. Her poetry seems contemplative and thoughtful and she likes to look back on her past. I also thought that many of these poems are reflections on her own mortality and her past life. I must say, however, that they are not bitter or full of regret. She seems accepting of what is to come.

There are many poems that I really liked.....

Little Grandmother

A dry-voiced chickadee
reproves what's gone amiss.
From our crab-apple tree
she gazes critically
at autumn's entropy
and quietly says this:
I am Chickadee,
and things have gone amiss.

I love nature poetry especially when it describes something I have felt or thought when I am outside. This sums up Chickadee behavior well....a scolding little grandmother.

LeGuin likes to write about the sea and the ocean...there were a couple of times that I felt echoes in her poetry from her Earthsea trilogy...probably because I was reading it simultaneously but it still seems to be a common theme here too.

There is a long poem made up of 12 shorter poems that comprise a whole chapter of the book called So Far in which she states, "The metaphor (not the subject) of these twelve poems is Lt. William Bligh's navigation of an overloaded open boat four thousand miles from Tonga past the Australian coast to Timor in Maritime Southeast Asia." I have never thought of Bligh as a sympathetic figure but she tackled this in a very interesting way and I found myself wanting to go online and learn more.

One of the outstanding poems for me and also the penultimate poem in the book is this one.

Ancestry

I am such a long way from my ancestors now
in my extreme old age that I feel more one of them
than their descendants. Time comes round
in a bodily way I do not understand. Age undoes itself
and plays the Ouroboros. I the only daughter
have always been one of the tiny grandmothers,
laughing at everything, uncomprehending, incomprehensible.

And finally, On the Western Shore, is the last poem in the book and the final line of the second stanza reminds me of Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening with the evocation of the final line of the poem, "and miles to go before I sleep".

The lowest, the neap tide,
that bares the long reaches
that were deep underwater
where the slope grows steep,
is when to walk out so far
that looking back you see
no shore. Under bare feet
the sand is bare and rippled. Dark
of evening deepens into night
and the sea becomes sleep.

~

Again that focus on mortality but also, if you have read the final book of the original Earthsea trilogy, The Farthest Shore, this is where the Archmage Ged saves Earthsea and loses his magic in the farthest west.

Then again, it's poetry, and I don't know what was really on her mind but I love to speculate nonetheless. ( )

I hadn't even realised Le Guin had published poetry until I saw this on a shelf. It's a wonderful collection; very clearly from the same mind that gave us her scifi novels but focussed much more on Earth and her own life. ( )