Although Le Guin's work does not much resemble the jokey surrealism currently fashionable in poetry, she is excellent company, intelligent and frequently razor-sharp wise. She offers the testimony of a practiced writer with layered insights into old age, as too few have done before her, and we willingly follow her ... Le Guin's last completed collection should be accessible to a wide range of readers, including her fiction fans; her keen and eloquent style engages age, memory, nature, time, and perception.
Fans will recognize some of the motifs here—cats, wind, strong women—as well as her exploration of the intersection between soul and body, the knowable and the unknown. The writing is clear, artful and reverent as Le Guin looks back at key memories and concerns and looks forward to what is next: 'Spirit, rehearse the journey of the body/ that are to come, the motions/ of the matter that held you.'
The poems are aware of the earth, the human connection to the earth, and the beauty of what cannot be known now ... Such perspective becomes cosmic ... Readers enter the speaker’s dreams, the waking hours, and the spaces in between ... Thematically, the unknown occupies a great deal of space throughout the poems ... The uncertainty of the poems, their dreamlike quality, is spun over readers again and again. The themes are accentuated by short, alliterative lines in which sound haunts just as much as the subject matter does ... In an intriguing way, So Far So Good frees the speaker from the traditional moorings of time and space. Like a time traveler, the speaker moves through memory into spaces beyond her understanding ... Readers who rest in these meditative poems are sure to find the voice of the beloved Le Guin just as intriguing as they did in her prose.
Of the poems assembled in this collection, readers may ask are they nearly as fast as, or faster than, light? They are koan-ical, comical; here a little Dorothy Parker, there a touch Richard Brautigan. And so they are ever-shadowy where objects block the sun ... these poems are candid in the extreme, casual in the faces of death, funny, glum, reverent, irreverent, certain, uncertain, but never trivial, never an afterthought, never the product of anything other than rigor and discipline and delight in what’s left of the world.
