2024 read #26: Wild Angels by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Wild Angels by Ursula K. Le Guin

52 pages

Published 1975

Read February 20

Rating: 4 out of 5

Sometimes, browsing online archives of dubious provenance, you stumble upon lost curiosities. This is a chapbook released by Capra Press, a highbrow indie press that seemingly specialized in limited edition books from startlingly famous authors. (They also released titles by Anaïs Nin and Raymond Carver, among others.) I never expected to read a chapbook of poetry from Le Guin, but I’d never be able to pass up the opportunity after learning of it.

It’s strange encountering Le Guin’s poetry after reading so much of her long-form prose work. It’s also strange, having read almost exclusively poetry from the last five years (plus a sprinkling of Romantic and Victorian pieces), reading poetry from nearly fifty years ago. Wild Angels is neither as formally antiquated as Goblin Market, nor as pulsing and gristly as The Thirteen Scorned Wives of La Nuit.

In the extensive narrative of “Coming of Age,” Le Guin writes:

Call to me here and I will come,

knowing my name and the game's rules

and all the rest I've learnt.

But I will not call their names

nor name them to you, those,

the children playing in the ruined fort,

the little falcons, the inheritors.

It’s good, a compelling poem full of meaning, but it shows a touch of midcentury stiffness, of reserve packed into all those commas. Or rather, the rhythm is just something I’m not used to. Clearly, I need to expand my poetry readings beyond the contemporary vibes. Poetry, more so than other formats, demands effort from its readers to open its inner timelessness.

This chapbook, once I adjust my expectations to the meter of ’70s poetry, feels consummately Le Guinian. She glides without apparent effort from the inaccessibility of nostalgia to  how women are used by society to the easy answers of bigotry, from the smallness of childhood to the limitations of adult wisdom to an atheist’s conversation with God, all within the same poem.

The rest of the poems, while briefer than the sprawling “Coming of Age,” circle around the same motifs and build upon its imagery, revisiting falcons and oat grass, what culture consigns to femininity and everything in the world that gets neglected by God. But Le Guin’s interests gyre wider, into creation, into dreams, into myth. Death looms everywhere; birth is a fate little better.