So Far So Good

A Poet Most People Forgot to Notice

Ursula K. Le Guin was known to the world primarily as a novelist – the author of the Hainish Cycle, the Earthsea novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed. What was less widely known outside the literary poetry community was that she had been writing and publishing poetry throughout her career, and that in the last years of her life she produced some of the most beautiful poems of her career. So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014-2018, published by Copper Canyon Press six months after her death at eighty-eight in January 2018, is both a farewell and a summation. It is a collection that rewards the attention of everyone who loved her fiction and of everyone who simply cares about the possibilities of the short lyric.

The Old Woman and Age

Le Guin came to the end of her life with what appears to have been genuine equanimity, and the collection reflects that. The poems about aging – about the body’s diminishment, about what you can no longer do, about the approach of death – are not desperate or mournful but clear-eyed and occasionally sardonic. Le Guin had spent a lifetime imagining other ways of being in the world, and that practice of imagination gave her resources for facing mortality that many people lack. The poems do not pretend aging is easy or death is comfortable; they simply refuse to perform anxiety about it.

Taoism and Attention

Le Guin was a lifelong student of Taoism – she produced her own translation of the Tao Te Ching in 1997 – and that philosophical tradition shapes the collection’s characteristic register. The poems are attentive to the present moment, to what is actually here, to the specific texture of perception. Le Guin is interested in the way things are before and after interpretation, in the light on a morning in Portland, in the particular quality of a winter afternoon. This attention to the present, rooted in Taoist philosophy, gives the poems a quality of radical availability: they ask very little of the reader and give a great deal.

The Short Lyric as Clarity

The poems in So Far So Good are almost all brief – none longer than a page, most shorter. This compression is not a limitation but a formal argument: the short lyric can achieve a kind of clarity that longer forms cannot, can present a single moment of perception or understanding with nothing around it to qualify or explain. Le Guin’s short poems have a quality of having removed everything unnecessary until what remains is essential. This is harder to do than it looks, and the collection’s apparent simplicity is the product of considerable craft.

Memory, Loss, and the Work

The collection also includes poems about loss – friends and colleagues who have died, things that have changed irreversibly, the particular grief of late age. And there are poems about the work of writing itself, about what it has meant to spend a life in language, about what she hopes will remain. These poems have a quality of taking stock that is neither proud nor modest but simply honest: here is what I tried to do, here is what I think I did, here is what matters. Le Guin was one of the most morally serious writers of the twentieth century, and that seriousness is evident in these late poems without being heavy.

A Final Gift

So Far So Good was the book Le Guin was working on in the final years of her life, and she completed it before her death. This means it is not a posthumous collection in the sense of work retrieved from archives or assembled by others – it is her final artistic statement, shaped and ordered by her own hand. That intentionality gives the collection a quality of genuine farewell that is rare and moving. She knew what she was doing, and she did it well.

Verdict

So Far So Good is the final word from one of the most important imaginative minds of the twentieth century, and it is a beautiful word: clear, kind, and unafraid. Readers who loved her fiction will find here a different register of her voice, quieter and more intimate. Readers who love poetry will find a short lyric artist of genuine accomplishment. Essential for both.

What is So Far So Good about?

So Far So Good collects the final poems of Ursula K. Le Guin, written between 2014 and 2018, the year of her death. The poems address aging, the natural world, memory, loss, and the practice of attention – all filtered through a Taoist-influenced sensibility that finds in the present moment its own sufficient meaning. The collection was completed by Le Guin before her death and published posthumously by Copper Canyon Press.

Is So Far So Good a good introduction to Le Guin’s poetry?

Yes – it is accessible and does not require knowledge of her fiction or any prior acquaintance with her poetry. The poems are brief, clear, and emotionally direct. Readers who want to explore her poetry further might also look at Late in the Day (2016) and Finding My Elegy (2012), which collect earlier work.

How does Le Guin’s fiction sensibility appear in the poems?

The imagination that built Earthsea and the Hainish Cycle is present in the poetry in the attention to world-making and to the strangeness of existence, but the poems do not read like prose fiction compressed. They have their own formal economy and their own concerns. What carries over from the fiction is Le Guin’s characteristic ethical seriousness, her interest in what it means to live well, and her lifelong attention to the nonhuman world.

Was Le Guin primarily a poet or a novelist?

She was primarily known as a novelist and short story writer, but she wrote and published poetry throughout her career. She produced several collections and a translation of the Tao Te Ching that is widely regarded as one of the best in English. Her poetry received less attention than her fiction during her lifetime, and So Far So Good arrived after her death to a readership that was largely discovering this dimension of her work for the first time.

What is the relationship between Le Guin’s Taoism and her poetry?

Le Guin studied Taoism throughout her adult life and published her own translation of the Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, 1997). Taoist thought shapes her poetry’s characteristic mode: its attention to the present moment, its comfort with paradox, its preference for showing over telling, its interest in what is before and beneath interpretation. The short lyric form she favors in So Far So Good is well-suited to Taoist poetics – both are interested in the minimum necessary to create the maximum effect.

How should fans of Le Guin’s fiction approach her poetry?

With the expectation of finding something different. The poetry does not read like compressed fiction or like thematic summaries of her novels’ concerns. It reads like poetry – particular, sometimes difficult, always rewarding close attention. Readers who love her prose for its moral seriousness and its visionary imagination will find both of those qualities present in the poetry, but in a different register. Start with So Far So Good, which is the most accessible of her collections and the most complete statement of her poetic voice.

What is the significance of the title So Far So Good?

The title has the quality of a shrug that is also a statement of genuine satisfaction: so far, things have gone well enough. It is characteristic of Le Guin’s late style – modest about claims, honest about uncertainty, comfortable with provisional assessment. The “so far” acknowledges that the account is not yet closed; the “so good” is neither triumphant nor resigned but simply honest. It is the kind of title that becomes more resonant when you know the author died before the book was published.

What other Copper Canyon Press poets are similar to Le Guin?

Copper Canyon Press has published many of the most important American poets of the last several decades. Readers who respond to Le Guin’s clarity, attention to the natural world, and philosophical depth might also explore W.S. Merwin (who also drew on Taoist thought), Jane Hirshfield (who shares the interest in Buddhist and Taoist practice), or Linda Gregg. All are published by or associated with the traditions Copper Canyon represents: serious, accessible, deeply crafted poetry.