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Poetry #3
Hard Words, and Other Poems
Short poems by the successful science-fiction writer deal with Cornwall, New York City, and Oregon, and portray the wisdom of other cultures and beliefs
- GenresPoetry
79 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
2 people are currently reading
118 people want to read
About the author
Ursula K. Le Guin
1,046 books30.4k followersUrsula 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 15, 2020
It is time for a confession: I had never read Ursula Le Guin. I hadn't. It was a strange thought then that prodded me to begin my exploration with this collection, but it is one that I do not regret. I read this on a day of semi-quarantine, just a precaution. I imagined something crisp and fleeting but what I found was elaborate and fixed, an installation of language which pulsated. I appreciated the deep resonance as well as the use of vernacular. As the windy day reach its sigh I was glad for the companionship. It was also a welcome to explore further.
June 12, 2018
It often feels like Le Guin is having so much fun writing these. Playing with language, with sound, with shape, with traditional meter, with the more unusual and experimental: it's a delightful collection.
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June 21, 2018Will be reading a bunch of Le Guin's poetry collections to help Spouseperson prepare for editing the Aqueduct Le Guin tribute anthology, but I probably won't be reviewing them (they are also kind of beyond the scope of my reviews). Just so you know why I am reading like 6 of them in a row :)
Source of the book: KU Watson Library
Source of the book: KU Watson Library
June 7, 2009
Le Guin's poetry is, as the title suggests, difficult going. One pursues a thread of meaning and suddenly, as without warning, there is a warp drive move in another direction into a new dimmension. It makes for frustrating reading on occasion.
However it is best, I have found, to come back again and again, to read some of these and allow them to work themselves out, as it were. Attitude very rarely yields any great reward in things and just like these poems which can, on occasion, be seemingly unyielding, one will eventually find the profound vision she captures with provocative, if unorthodox, images. Like all good things, this is worth the effort.
However it is best, I have found, to come back again and again, to read some of these and allow them to work themselves out, as it were. Attitude very rarely yields any great reward in things and just like these poems which can, on occasion, be seemingly unyielding, one will eventually find the profound vision she captures with provocative, if unorthodox, images. Like all good things, this is worth the effort.
July 22, 2023
I continue to be fascinated by how much I like Ursula LeGuin's poetic prose, but find myself underwhelmed by her actual poetry. There's something about the simple, yet lyrical writing in her fiction that I find captivating; it moves me to another place. I read at a different rhythm. That element often feels lacking in her poems.
Hard Words collects more of her poetry, perhaps 60 or so short pieces, across five sections. One portion is the entire series that made up the Walking in Cornwall collection, which I've reviewed before. The others are broken into thematic groups, including a section that seems to be about a visit to India, and another that focuses on her fascination with words and language.
In general, I find her descriptive poems the least interesting. Like the Cornwall sequence, the entries that describe things - a stream, a street, her husband flying a kite - are uninteresting. Her words may accurately convey her experience of seeing those things, of being in those places at those times, but they do nothing for me.
Where the collection sings is when she becomes more abstract, working with simile and metaphor. Take for example, these lines from "The Marrow":
There was a word inside a stone.
I tried to pry it clear,
mallet and chisel, pick and gad,
until the stone was dropping blood.
As a depiction of a writer's struggle, this is epic. But unlike the descriptive pieces, there is absolutely nothing literal about it. Or take her poem "Everest," which could be viewed as a literal description of a visit to Nepal, but is probably more accurately read as a metaphor for a life passing through middle age. When she reaches the summit, her narrator writes:
I don't know.
You look down. It's strange
not to be looking up; hard to be sure
just what it is you're seeing.
LeGuin appears to be describing what it feels like to know your life is more than halfway gone, and that there are no more professional mountains to climb; the path leads down to the grave from here. But it is the ambiguity of these lines, and the internalization of the metaphor - the shift from first person to second - that make this poem strong. And that I can get excited about.
Unfortunately, poems such as these two are only a fraction of the collection. Too much of this feels like filler, or pieces that really weren't intended for a broad audience. The temptation with a famous or well-respected author is to publish everything they ever wrote. Nonetheless, some of these poems should have been left as personal pieces, or ones only for the die hard scholars.
Hard Words collects more of her poetry, perhaps 60 or so short pieces, across five sections. One portion is the entire series that made up the Walking in Cornwall collection, which I've reviewed before. The others are broken into thematic groups, including a section that seems to be about a visit to India, and another that focuses on her fascination with words and language.
In general, I find her descriptive poems the least interesting. Like the Cornwall sequence, the entries that describe things - a stream, a street, her husband flying a kite - are uninteresting. Her words may accurately convey her experience of seeing those things, of being in those places at those times, but they do nothing for me.
Where the collection sings is when she becomes more abstract, working with simile and metaphor. Take for example, these lines from "The Marrow":
There was a word inside a stone.
I tried to pry it clear,
mallet and chisel, pick and gad,
until the stone was dropping blood.
As a depiction of a writer's struggle, this is epic. But unlike the descriptive pieces, there is absolutely nothing literal about it. Or take her poem "Everest," which could be viewed as a literal description of a visit to Nepal, but is probably more accurately read as a metaphor for a life passing through middle age. When she reaches the summit, her narrator writes:
I don't know.
You look down. It's strange
not to be looking up; hard to be sure
just what it is you're seeing.
LeGuin appears to be describing what it feels like to know your life is more than halfway gone, and that there are no more professional mountains to climb; the path leads down to the grave from here. But it is the ambiguity of these lines, and the internalization of the metaphor - the shift from first person to second - that make this poem strong. And that I can get excited about.
Unfortunately, poems such as these two are only a fraction of the collection. Too much of this feels like filler, or pieces that really weren't intended for a broad audience. The temptation with a famous or well-respected author is to publish everything they ever wrote. Nonetheless, some of these poems should have been left as personal pieces, or ones only for the die hard scholars.
September 30, 2009
Ursula K. Le Guin, Hard Words and Other Poems (Harper and Row, 1981)
Every time I pick up a book by Ursula Le Guin, I'm excited. And somehow, every time, I wind up disappointed. I know the woman has legions of fans, and she probably deserves them, but there's something about her style that just drives me right up the ceiling with the spiders and the flies. I usually can't put my finger on it. And I once again forgot when I discovered she'd written a book of poetry (at least two, actually, as this was her second) and approached it with the same enthusiasm. Then came the inevitable “what the hell is this?” moments, but since I was dealing with poetry, the finger-putting began in earnest. In fact, it's been kind of hard to keep this review to a thousand words (anyone who's ever seen me when I get rolling on a poem critique will understand why), so this may be a bit disjointed. My apologies. Why is it so long? Because I can't talk about this book highlighting a single poem. I have to talk about three.
This is odd in the world of poetry. Authors, at least since the time of Auden being the king of the hill, have striven for at least a loose thematic unity in full-length poetry collections (save, of course, books of the Selected/Collected variety, for obvious reasons). I can usually grab a piece at random and trust it to be representative of the whole collection. Two at best for an inconsistent poet. Not so Le Guin, who ranges all over the map not only thematically but stylistically as well. There are a lot of experiments in this book, and most of them don't work all too well, in part because they're rootless. I'm all for the idea that sound is more important than sense in poetry, but that doesn't mean that sense is not important at all; only the best poets are capable of sound with no sense at all, and the only one I can think of who's pulled it off since the seventies is Timothy Donnelly. Which leads us to something like the title poem:
“Hard words
lockerbones
this is sour ground
dust to ashes
sounds soft
hard in the mouth
as stones
as teeth
Earth speaks birds
airbornes
diphthongs”
I quoted the entire poem mostly to illustrate that I'm not taking something out of context and pointing to it as meaningless (I had originally meant to just take the first strophe), but that the poem contains no real context in which to put things. It's kind of the opposite of imagism; there is the odd image to be found here, but the images one can find aren't anchored to anything. And what on earth is a lockerbone? Neologisms are wonderful, as long as you can ascertain what they're supposed to mean from what surrounds them. There's not enough substance here, however, for us to figure it out. What makes it all the more frustrating is that Le Guin is obviously getting at something here (well, perhaps “obvious” is not the right word, but “hard in the mouth/as stones/as teeth” points at something underlying this); the question is, what? I never thought I'd be saying it, as much as I'm a proponent of style over substance, but it doesn't work for me because I can't make heads or tails of it.
As much as the first section (from which “Hard Words” comes) is unintelligible, the second section, which I'm going to gloss over for purposes of brevity, makes it look like a model of clarity. This is the most experimental bit of the book; Le Guin took the rhythms of drumming and dancing and worked with them, trying to turn them into intelligible language in much the same way Antonin Artaud did in the last few years of his life. Suffice to say Artaud did it better, and thirty years before this.
The third section heads back to the idea of the first, though the section title (“Line Drawings”) leads me to the conclusion these are ekphrastic pieces (poems based on arts and crafts); the dedications on some of them seem to bear this out, and I get the feeling that a number of these poems are too personal for the common reader to get a handle on. Le Guin, and the person for whom she was writing any given piece, probably get them clear as day.
All this changes in the fourth section, “Walking in Cornwall”, which is exactly what it sounds like. And in the poetry of place, Le Guin finds what it is she's been looking for in all the poems leading up to this; her sonic experiments have a context, a firm ground on which to build—quite literally. This set of three poems, the three longest in the book, detail exactly what the section head tells us they do, and they do it well.
“Straight on from the standing stones
of the northwest gateway, past the view
to Morva and the dull gleam of the sea,
over the granite backbone of the land
to Chun Quoit. Here's a grave turned inside out.
They set the stone slabs up, set the great roofstone on,
laid the bodies in the room of rock,
piled the earth all over in a mound,
a rounded barrow....
The covering earth's
all gone, the bones are gone; the grave
itself stands up, grey granite in the wind.
There's not a soul, there's not a sound.
Sun's gold on the old stones.”
(“Chun”)
The wordplay from the first and third sections cohabits with the rhythms from the second section, and everyone feels right at home. Would that travel guides were written thus.
Then comes the fifth section. You know how, in some Selected/Collected books, there's a section called “New Poems”, which is basically a catch-all for stuff that hasn't gotten published elsewhere? That's section five here, which has a bit of everything we've seen before. The image and rhythm poems, though, are a lot better anchored, and the long piece here, “The Well of Baln”, even outdoes the Cornwall poems; it's a fine little tale in the tradition, if not the style, of a good old-fashioned Ballad (in the classical sense). Compare this to “Hard Words”:
“Mole my totem
mound builder
maze maker
tooth at the root
shaper of darkness
into ways and hollows
in grave alive
heavy handed
light blinded”
(“Totem”)
Again, the entire poem, but this time we've got what is, essentially, a statement of purpose in the first line, and suddenly everything makes sense. Rhythmically, the two poems are alike right down to the almost list form of the final two lines, but here those two items at the end have an obvious connection to everything else.
I've spent a whole lot of time on a book I'm only giving two stars; were the rest of it as accomplished as the final two sections (which are unfortunately only about a quarter of the content here), the rating would be a lot higher. It's worth checking out for those two sections, but you may have some trouble with the bits that come before. **
Every time I pick up a book by Ursula Le Guin, I'm excited. And somehow, every time, I wind up disappointed. I know the woman has legions of fans, and she probably deserves them, but there's something about her style that just drives me right up the ceiling with the spiders and the flies. I usually can't put my finger on it. And I once again forgot when I discovered she'd written a book of poetry (at least two, actually, as this was her second) and approached it with the same enthusiasm. Then came the inevitable “what the hell is this?” moments, but since I was dealing with poetry, the finger-putting began in earnest. In fact, it's been kind of hard to keep this review to a thousand words (anyone who's ever seen me when I get rolling on a poem critique will understand why), so this may be a bit disjointed. My apologies. Why is it so long? Because I can't talk about this book highlighting a single poem. I have to talk about three.
This is odd in the world of poetry. Authors, at least since the time of Auden being the king of the hill, have striven for at least a loose thematic unity in full-length poetry collections (save, of course, books of the Selected/Collected variety, for obvious reasons). I can usually grab a piece at random and trust it to be representative of the whole collection. Two at best for an inconsistent poet. Not so Le Guin, who ranges all over the map not only thematically but stylistically as well. There are a lot of experiments in this book, and most of them don't work all too well, in part because they're rootless. I'm all for the idea that sound is more important than sense in poetry, but that doesn't mean that sense is not important at all; only the best poets are capable of sound with no sense at all, and the only one I can think of who's pulled it off since the seventies is Timothy Donnelly. Which leads us to something like the title poem:
“Hard words
lockerbones
this is sour ground
dust to ashes
sounds soft
hard in the mouth
as stones
as teeth
Earth speaks birds
airbornes
diphthongs”
I quoted the entire poem mostly to illustrate that I'm not taking something out of context and pointing to it as meaningless (I had originally meant to just take the first strophe), but that the poem contains no real context in which to put things. It's kind of the opposite of imagism; there is the odd image to be found here, but the images one can find aren't anchored to anything. And what on earth is a lockerbone? Neologisms are wonderful, as long as you can ascertain what they're supposed to mean from what surrounds them. There's not enough substance here, however, for us to figure it out. What makes it all the more frustrating is that Le Guin is obviously getting at something here (well, perhaps “obvious” is not the right word, but “hard in the mouth/as stones/as teeth” points at something underlying this); the question is, what? I never thought I'd be saying it, as much as I'm a proponent of style over substance, but it doesn't work for me because I can't make heads or tails of it.
As much as the first section (from which “Hard Words” comes) is unintelligible, the second section, which I'm going to gloss over for purposes of brevity, makes it look like a model of clarity. This is the most experimental bit of the book; Le Guin took the rhythms of drumming and dancing and worked with them, trying to turn them into intelligible language in much the same way Antonin Artaud did in the last few years of his life. Suffice to say Artaud did it better, and thirty years before this.
The third section heads back to the idea of the first, though the section title (“Line Drawings”) leads me to the conclusion these are ekphrastic pieces (poems based on arts and crafts); the dedications on some of them seem to bear this out, and I get the feeling that a number of these poems are too personal for the common reader to get a handle on. Le Guin, and the person for whom she was writing any given piece, probably get them clear as day.
All this changes in the fourth section, “Walking in Cornwall”, which is exactly what it sounds like. And in the poetry of place, Le Guin finds what it is she's been looking for in all the poems leading up to this; her sonic experiments have a context, a firm ground on which to build—quite literally. This set of three poems, the three longest in the book, detail exactly what the section head tells us they do, and they do it well.
“Straight on from the standing stones
of the northwest gateway, past the view
to Morva and the dull gleam of the sea,
over the granite backbone of the land
to Chun Quoit. Here's a grave turned inside out.
They set the stone slabs up, set the great roofstone on,
laid the bodies in the room of rock,
piled the earth all over in a mound,
a rounded barrow....
The covering earth's
all gone, the bones are gone; the grave
itself stands up, grey granite in the wind.
There's not a soul, there's not a sound.
Sun's gold on the old stones.”
(“Chun”)
The wordplay from the first and third sections cohabits with the rhythms from the second section, and everyone feels right at home. Would that travel guides were written thus.
Then comes the fifth section. You know how, in some Selected/Collected books, there's a section called “New Poems”, which is basically a catch-all for stuff that hasn't gotten published elsewhere? That's section five here, which has a bit of everything we've seen before. The image and rhythm poems, though, are a lot better anchored, and the long piece here, “The Well of Baln”, even outdoes the Cornwall poems; it's a fine little tale in the tradition, if not the style, of a good old-fashioned Ballad (in the classical sense). Compare this to “Hard Words”:
“Mole my totem
mound builder
maze maker
tooth at the root
shaper of darkness
into ways and hollows
in grave alive
heavy handed
light blinded”
(“Totem”)
Again, the entire poem, but this time we've got what is, essentially, a statement of purpose in the first line, and suddenly everything makes sense. Rhythmically, the two poems are alike right down to the almost list form of the final two lines, but here those two items at the end have an obvious connection to everything else.
I've spent a whole lot of time on a book I'm only giving two stars; were the rest of it as accomplished as the final two sections (which are unfortunately only about a quarter of the content here), the rating would be a lot higher. It's worth checking out for those two sections, but you may have some trouble with the bits that come before. **
June 30, 2023
Look up, look out! Desire
comes to adore you,
over the April meadow.
comes to adore you,
over the April meadow.
January 28, 2024
I liked some of these poems and not others. I am not much of a poetry scholar though, so others may like them better.
August 1, 2025
She will always be my favorite poet.
October 31, 2025
A quiet, slow book of poems about quiet, slow things looking at the world in a slow quiet way.
I'm reading all of Le Guin's works, in order of publication. This is her second book of poetry. I thought the first was a little rough, but I think she's already found her voice in this one. There is a lot about the differences and overlap between human time and cosmic time, dancing, motherhood, and stones. There are many good ones, but "The Dancing at Tillai" and "Walking in Cornwall" stand out to me as having the deepest vision. "Everest" is one of the most brilliant takes on middle-age I've ever come across.
Where I think the book stumbles a bit is the obscure, modernist, deep-cutting literary reference poems. There are just a couple of these. They're not bad, but I think they haven't aged well. She lived in a world where it made sense, in a book about motherhood and cosmic time and stones, to include a poem about Richard III along with his French motto. We don't live in that world anymore, but that's not her fault.
Really enjoyable and refreshing read.
I'm reading all of Le Guin's works, in order of publication. This is her second book of poetry. I thought the first was a little rough, but I think she's already found her voice in this one. There is a lot about the differences and overlap between human time and cosmic time, dancing, motherhood, and stones. There are many good ones, but "The Dancing at Tillai" and "Walking in Cornwall" stand out to me as having the deepest vision. "Everest" is one of the most brilliant takes on middle-age I've ever come across.
Where I think the book stumbles a bit is the obscure, modernist, deep-cutting literary reference poems. There are just a couple of these. They're not bad, but I think they haven't aged well. She lived in a world where it made sense, in a book about motherhood and cosmic time and stones, to include a poem about Richard III along with his French motto. We don't live in that world anymore, but that's not her fault.
Really enjoyable and refreshing read.
July 25, 2016
Some fine work here, some brief lyrical pieces, too, which feel as if they come from one of many fantasy realms of Le Guin. Worth a read for he fans and poetry folks in general.
Read
March 5, 2018My favorite poems from this collection include: "Invocation," "The Night," "Drums," "Smith Creek," and "We Are Dust."
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews