LEAVES by Ursula K. Le Guin: Poems, Insights, and Her Literary Legacy

Meri Utkovska
Dec 20, 2023
5 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Elderly woman in black and white, looking down with a gentle expression. Short hair, lined face, plain background. Mood is contemplative. — Ursula K. Le Guin in 2016. Photo courtesy and copyright of William Anthony.

Leaves, To the Rain and Hymn to Time: Three of Le Guin's Masterful Poems Leaves

By Ursula K. Le Guin

Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say

I am that child in the photograph

at Kishamish in 1935?

Might as well say I am the shadow

of a leaf of the acacia tree

felled seventy years ago

moving on the page the child reads.

Might as well say I am the words she read

or the words I wrote in other years,

flicker of shade and sunlight

To the Rain

By Ursula K. Le Guin

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,

Hymn to Time

By Ursula K. Le Guin

Time says “Let there be”

every moment and instantly

there is space and the radiance

of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.

And the gnats’ flickering dance.

And the seas’ expanse.

And death, and chance.

Time makes room

for going and coming home

and in time’s womb

begins all ending.

Time is being and being

time, it is all one thing,

the shining, the seeing,

the dark abounding.

About Ursula K. Le Guin

Born in Berkley, California, on October 21, 1929, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author, essayist, short story writer and poet. She authored over 20 novels, several books of essays, over 100 short stories, and a dozen books of poetry.

Le Guin earned her BA from Radcliffe College and her MA in Romance Literature from Columbia University. She then studied in Paris on a Fulbright fellowship and began her doctoral studies, which she later abandoned after marrying her husband, historian Charles Le Guin, in 1953.

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Writing Style and Influences

Le Guin started writing full-time in the late 1950s, and her fiction gravitated toward the genre of science fiction. Strongly influenced by Taoism, cultural anthropology, feminism, and the writings of Carl Jung, Le Guin explored our own world through fantasy, philosophical inquiry, and the search for balance and equilibrium. As a child, she found Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching in her father’s library, and remained deeply moved by Taoist principles throughout her life.

First published in 1959, Le Guin was best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, as well as the Earthsea fantasy series.

Le Guin's Poetry and Awards

Le Guin's poetry collections include:

Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014,
Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems (2012),
Incredible Good Fortune (2006), and
Sixty Odd (1999).

Her incredible imagination and commitment towards her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards.

She died on January 22nd, 2018.

Essential Books by Ursula K. Le Guin

Late in the Day

(hardback)

Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

Late in the Day, Ursula K. Le Guin's newest collection of poems, seeks meaning in an ever-connected world. In part evocative of Neruda's Odes to Common Things and Mary Oliver's poetic guides to the natural world, Le Guin gives voice to objects that may not speak a human language but communicate with us nevertheless through and about the seasonal rhythms of the earth, the minute and the vast, the ordinary and the mythological.

As Le Guin herself states, "science explicates, poetry implicates." Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. Deceptively simple in form, the poems stand as an invitation both to dive deep and to step outside of ourselves and our common narratives. As readers, we emerge refreshed, having peered underneath cultural constructs toward the necessarily mystical and elemental, no matter how late in the day.

The poems are bookended with two short essays, "Deep in Admiration" and "Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts."

In 2014, the National Book Foundation awarded Le Guin the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a lifetime achievement award. Her celebrated acceptance speech, which criticized Amazon as a "profiteer" and praised her fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, is included in Late in the Day as a postscript.

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So Far So Good

(paperback)

Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

Millions lauded Le Guin for her groundbreaking science fiction novels, but she began as a poet.

Le Guin wrote across genres for her entire career, and poetry was a cardinal mode of expression―offering a path that led readers to discover her voice at close, intimate range. In this clarifying and sublime collection―completed shortly before her death in 2018―Le Guin is unflinching in the face of mortality, 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, So Far So Good lovingly pays tribute to the memories, friendships, and timeless questions that comprised a spectacular and generous life.

With profound wisdom and tenacious levity, a true literary hero bookends a long, daring, and prolific career.

As Publishers Weekly hailed in a starred review of So Far So Good, "[Le Guin's] 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. SHOP THE BOOK FROM BOOKSHOP

Finding My Elegy

(paperback)

Description

courtesy of Bookshop.org

"[Le Guin] never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is." — Margaret Atwood

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. SHOP THE BOOK FROM BOOKSHOP

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