HARD WORDS, AND OTHER POEMS

Like so many other prose writers, sf eminence Le Guin appears to regard verse as an opportunity to run amok—she abandons narrative, syntax, and punctuation for glib nursery rhymes and a mythopoeic beat: "sun dance/ stone dance/ bone dance/ one dance." Sometimes this can have the inadvertent appeal of the work of a talented child: "Let me go sideways sideways/ Let me go sideways shifty Lord/ there is doors Lord doors/ opening sideways." Or: "God's stomach/ rumbles like a drum/ when I jump on it/ when I dance on his chest he snores/when I dance on his gut he farts. . . ." Not all these poems are quite so boisterously runic; some quietly describe country walks, Celtic ruins—or moments of self-reflection: "At a quarter to fifth the clock struck/ Lost, lost in a sweet voice,/ Lost so many times/ that I lost count, and so believed,/ and came to live in the house of grief." Now and again, welcomely, the good writer prevails over the inept poet—but these occasions are too rare to redeem the volume as a whole.