Ursula K. Le Guin’s Late in the Day

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Although Ursula K. Le Guin died this past January, I would like to argue that we have not lost her voice, or her capacious and expansive soul.

I fell in love with this hardback book, Late in the Day (PM Press, 2016) and its gorgeous cover. Each time I saw it in the bookstore, I picked it up and reread the first poem, this one:

The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House

Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt
worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder
with blunt round ends, a tool: you know it when
you feel the subtle central turn or curve
that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands,
year after year after year, by women’s hands
that held it here, just where it must be held
to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl
and crush the seeds and rise and fall again
setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song
that worked itself at length into the stone,
so when I picked it up it told me how
to hold and heft it, put my fingers where
those fingers were that softly wore it down
to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand,
this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.

Le Guin was best known as a writer of science fiction, but she was also an essayist and a teacher (read her Steering the Craft, for an excellent example). What I notice about this poem, “The Small Indian Pestle,”  is that it is a little craft lesson all on its own. Its 16 lines in iambic pentameter are also a single sentence (the : may be cheating). It doesn’t rhyme, but the words are so strong–“Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt”–and the repetitions are so well-executed that it’s music.

Elsewhere in the book, she plays very deliberately with form and rhyme (and writes about it in a closing essay). I’m going to break with my usual routine and share one more poem, a rhymed one, that touched me in a very deep place.

Between 

Between the acts, the interval.
The leaves were late to fall, this fall.

Between the verdict and the doom,
a whisper in the waiting-room.

A non-event between events
holding a secret and a sense.

A winter wind just whispers where
two winter trees stand tense and bare.

“Between” is deceptively simple. It shows us how one needn’t be showy and ostentatious in order to be profound.

Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes

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I had a lot of driving to do today, and fortunately I  remembered that I have this book, Li-Young Lee‘s Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008), which includes a CD of the poet reading 22 of the poems. So I listened (a lovely experience), and read, too, and eventually made it through the entire book — and it’s 10:30 in the evening (on the 12th, which I thought all day was the 11th) — and I’m exhausted, and I’m very happy to have this book to recommend to you.

This book was given me by a friend, and I swear, I have read it, or read around in it. But I had never sat down and read it all the way through. And I had never been deliberate enough to take the CD out to the car (where I do my book-listening) and actually play it.

I know Li-Young Lee’s work mostly from a “greatest hits” perspective. Reading an entire book of his poetry is a quite different experience. Some of the poems seem remarkably un-poetic, sort of colloquial and mundane. “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees,” for instance, ends with this stanza: “Alone in your favorite chair / with a book you enjoy / is fine. But spooning / is even better.” Had I read just this poem (or such lines), I would have set the book aside with a shrug. But, tasked to read on, I encountered many powerful lines.

Let me say, however, that I think I have a lot of nerve critiquing Lee’s work. He is a master.

And the effect of a book is partly cumulative, of course (as I hope I’ve noted in earlier posts this month). Imagine finding just one Emily Dickinson poem and trying to understand why other people spend their entire life studying her. Anyway, in Lee’s “My Favorite Kingdom,” I found this little sequence of images, which is both simply put and swoon-worthy:

My favorite color is
my father’s apple trees in the rain.

My favorite color
is my father’s pear trees
in a cloud of bees.

So, who really knows what makes one reader yawn, and another sit up straight and listen harder? One has to take the time to sit with a poet to begin to appreciate them properly.

Here is a short poem that — listening to the CD — I knew I had to see on the page. It (too) is deceptively simple, but evocative of so much more.

To Hold 

So we’re dust. In the meantime my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

Edward O’Dwyer’s Bad News, Good News, Bad News

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I met Edward O’Dwyer at On the Nail, in Limerick last October, after we had both read on the open mike following the featured readers. He was curious about my book, and I about his, Bad News, Good News, Bad News (Salmon Poetry, 2017), so we traded. His book has a beautiful cover, and he wrote a really lovely inscription.

I also told him I had a daughter who had asked me to bring home “an Irish boy,” and he said, beaming, “Well, you’ve found a single one.”

Reading his poems, he doesn’t seem very single. But as many of the poems appear to be persona poems, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, should he ever show up on our doorstep.

In the interview (to which I’ve linked his name, above) he talks about Bad News and its context. Here’s a poem that I especially enjoyed, the last poem in the book:

The Credits 

(for Naomi, 09/04/2014)

A man with a very large camera
snapped our picture on Downhill Beach
during a week spent in a cottage outside Bushmills.

He said we’d wandered into his shot
yet we are in the centre of the frame, making
it a picture of us, and the intrusion his camera’s.

We are walking away, our backs to him,
the sun setting in front of us.
Our shadows stretch out long behind.

We are two darkened shapes blending,
at mid-distance, but it’s us. We know
it could be nobody else walking towards that sunset.

Here’s the thing: that moment
would have been a fine one for the world to end.
You could easily imagine the four horsemen

sweeping into the frame, and us
taking no great notice, accepting what will be,
wholly content for such a last moment.

This thought I have jokingly shared with you,
coaxing you to imagine that sky coming down,
dropping emphatically on us,

then one of those cinematic fades to black
where, if this were all a film,
the credits would start rolling down.

Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena

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Perhaps I should cop to my ulterior motive in doing this series.

I am a person who will spend her last dollar on a book. I have a house full of books, a number of them unread, and yet it’s difficult for me to attend a conference or a reading without coming home with … more books.

You know that expression, “like a kid in a candy store.” You can now amend that to, “Like a poet at a book sale.” My ulterior motive, then, is to finally create a good reason to actually read these books all the way through. I bring them home with the best of intentions, and I usually read a poem or two before they find their way to my shelf. Maybe I take them down now and then and read a little more. But I have a bad habit of not taking the time to them all the way through. So that, my friends, is what I’m doing.

Reading Sarah de Leeuw‘s Skeena (Caitlin Press, 2015) was, as with the other books, a surprise and a pleasure. It is not at all the sort of poetry I aspire to write; nonetheless, it had lessons for me in how one might think differently about what a poem is, and what it looks like.

Skeena is a book-length poem about the Skeena, the second-largest river in British Columbia. Leeuw is an award-winning Canadian poet, but she also has a Ph.D. in Geology, and the book is a collage of voices and textures, incorporating photographs, First People’s stories, the voice of the river, geologic time and details, and newspaper accounts. The book is not tidy, divided into ragged sections, and often exploding all over the pages, kind of like a river at floodtime. In addition to the artfulness of the poem’s execution, the dust jacket is a work of art. (Designed and hand screen printed by Briar Craig). Skeena was a finalist for the Willa Literary Award: Women Writing the West.

To hear part of Sarah de Leeuw’s interview with Cascadia Poetry Festival organizer Paul Nelson, including a reading of “Rain” (one of the most experimental of the sections) from Skeena, click here.

The blog does not accommodate poems (not easily) that are choreographed, so I’m going to cheat and share a picture. This is a book I would love to pass along to someone worthy, so let me know if you are interested.