“There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Ursula K. Le Guin's.”  —Grace Paley   Late in the Day , Ursula K. Le Guin’s new collection of poems (2010–2014) seeks meaning in an ever-connected world. In part evocative of Neruda’s Odes to Common Things and Mary Oliver’s poetic guides to the natural world, Le Guin’s latest give voice to objects that may not speak a human language but communicate with us nevertheless through and about the seasonal rhythms of the earth, the minute and the vast, the ordinary and the mythological. As Le Guin herself states, “science explicates, poetry implicates.” Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. Deceptively simple in form, the poems stand as an invitation both to dive deep and to step outside of ourselves and our common narratives. The poems are bookended with two short essays, “Deep in Admiration” and “Some Thoughts on Form, Free Form, Free Verse.” “A life-long observer of humanity and nature, who has borne critical witness to over eighty years of the modern age.”  —Jillian Saucier, Rattle “She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is.”  —Margaret Atwood “ Le Guin's down-to-earth, intensely personal voice is unmistakable.”  —Los Angeles Times "LeGuin writes about nature and quotidian happenings, but she weaves magic in. Get excited. Be moved. Go Ursula." —Michelle Anne Schingler, bookriot.com " Late in the Day intertwines our human stories with those of gnats and fireflies and stars and distant galaxies, in the hope that readers will look up, look out and see the world before, for them, it's gone." —Lizzy Acker, Willamette Week " Late in the Day is a fitting capstone to Ursula K. Le Guin’s long career. The poems, with their diverse topics and varied forms, show versatility and compassion." —George Longenecker, Rain Taxi Ursula K. Le Guin is a mentor to two generations of radical feminist and progressive writers. Her novels and stories have won every major science fiction and fantasy award as well as the Pen/Malamud and the National Book Award. Her works include The Dispossessed , The Left Hand of Darkness , and A Wizard of Earthsea . In 2014, she was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, a lifetime achievement award. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Late in the Day Poems 2010-2014 By Ursula K. Le Guin PM Press Copyright © 2016 Ursula K. Le Guin All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-62963-122-6 Contents FOREWORD, RELATIONS, The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House, Incense, Kitchen Spoons, Earthenware, Kinship, Western Outlaws, The Canada Lynx, The One Thing Missing, CONTEMPLATIONS, In Ashland, My House, Contemplation at McCoy Creek, Constellating, Hymn to Time, Whiteness, Geology of the Northwest Coast, Hymn to Aphrodite, MESSENGERS, Element 80, The Story, Arion, Messages, The Dream Stone, Hermes Betrayed, FOUR LINES, The Salt, March, Harney County Catenaries, Artemisia Tridentata, Ecola, Written in the Dark, Song, Night Sounds, WORKS, Orders, The Games, To Her Task-Master, Definition, or, Seeing the Horse, Dead Languages, California Landscape Paintings at the Portland Art Museum, My Job, TIMES, New Year's Day, Seasonal Lines, October, Sea Hallowe'en, Between, Writing Twilight, THE OLD MUSIC, The Old Music, Disremembering, Crossing the Cascades, Sorrowsong, The Old Mad Queen, The Pursuit, 2014: A Hymn, ENVOI, The Mist Horse, AFTERWORD, POSTSCRIPT, CHAPTER 1 RELATIONS      The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House     Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt     worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder     with blunt round ends, a tool: you know it when     you feel the subtle central turn or curve     that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands,     year after year after year, by women's hands     that held it here, just where it must be held     to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl     and crush the seeds and rise and fall again     setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song     that worked itself at length into the stone,     so when I picked it up it told me how     to hold and heft it, put my fingers where     those fingers were that softly wore it down     to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand,     this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.      Incense      for H.F.     The match-flame held to the half-inch block     catches, and I blow it out.     The flame grows and flashes     gold, then shrinks and almost dies     to a drop of spectral blue     that detaches, floats,     a wisp of fire in air, dances     high, a little higher, is gone.     Now     from the incense smouldering     sweet smoke of cedar rises     a while like memory.     Then only ashes.      Kitchen Spoons