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maenad_wordsmith's review
My favorite poems from this collection include: "Invocation," "The Night," "Drums," "Smith Creek," and "We Are Dust."
xterminal's review
2.0
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. **
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