Learning the Names

by Ursula K. Le Guin, Conner Bouchard-Roberts (Editor)

Poetry collection.

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2025

About the author

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.

She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.

Reviews

[Kyle Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous stuff. I love the recurring motif of Le Guin's search for "the word"—the language in which the meaning of all things can be found, but always just out of her reach, at least while alive. The word is at times this "elusive spring of the absurd," and the act of writing requires working with "insubstantial" matter, like the water or the wind, like shadows on the wall, shaping things from nothing. The Earth stores some of these words, in birdsong, in stones, in rivers and dust, but our body can only understand them in fragments. Can already tell this will be one to revisit.


In all the tongues of all the lands unborn
there will be a rhyme for river
~
Maps of the high ground
must be drawn
~
When all the rhyms are found
Lord, release me then