My life in books

Ursula K. Le Guin is dead.

I have no words now, may never have the right words, the best words. Ursula Le Guin has been more than a favourite author to me, she has been an inspiration, and a guide to living a feminist life. She showed me that you must never stop fighting, stop learning, and that you must never stop interrogating your own thinking, never rest, satisfied that you have the answer. She taught me how to live always questioning, always caring, always growing, even though you may not be able to do all the things you could do before.

She will always be with me. With us.

Her latest volume of poetry, Late in the Day, was sitting in my queue of books to read on the day I heard of her death. And so in memory of Ursula, I read these precious words, the distilled images and ideas of a lifetime of honestly searching, fearlessly caring, passionately fighting, gloriously dreaming. Today is not, for me, a day to analyse, but to feel, to be, to fly once more with this great spirit.

Among many other things, these are indeed the poems of a person writing late in their day. There are poems here that speak of summing up, of letting go, of reflection and resolution. There are other poems, too, that speak of her great love for nature and life, of her awareness if the universe embodied so beautifully in ordinary things, of a Taoist worldview, of all the many elements and aspects of a great life, greatly and gratefully lived. But today, I am attuned to the poems of ending. In reading them, I feel that I am hearing Le Guin slowly, and joyfully, saying goodbye.

Untongued I turn to still
forgetting all I will.
Light lies the shadow
on the way I go.

Love Shook My Senses: Lesbian Love Poems, Gillian Spraggs (ed.)

There is something indescribably fulfilling, both intellectually and emotionally, about reading a good poem. The interplay of word and image and thought and sound and meaning and reference and idea and feeling and senses and all of those things that manage to speak to conscious and unconscious, mind and heart and soul, all at once, can be a profound and deeply enjoyable experience.

In this volume, Spraggs has collected poems of women who love women, whose voices speak out to us of their love, their delight, their sexual longing and fulfilment, their need, their sorrow, their contentment, their loss, their pain, their pleasure, their reminiscences, their expectations, their memories, their hopes... all of the wonderful and painful things that are a part of the experience called love.

Arranged thematically, each grouping loosely bound together by the feeling, the idea, the image of a few lines from one of the selected works, these poems speak from many times and places, with the tongues of women who have known what it is like to defy expected conventions of life and love. The title of the book itself is drawn from a fragment of one of the poems of Sappho, one of the earliest of those women whose expressions of love toward other women have survived, and speaks to the power of love, and the power of words to make that love resonate as long as they are remembered and read and spoken. Here are found the words both of women whose names are well-known, such as Sappho herself, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Aphra Behn, Judy Grahn, Angelina Weld Grimké, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, May Sarton, as well as many others whose names were new to me but whose words were a delight.

Spraggs notes in her Preface, from which I quote at some length because she says this much better than I ever could:

Traditionally, when passion, or grief, or intense joy disturb the settled patterns of our lives, we turn to poetry – our own, or other people’s. We look for words to give a voice to what cries out, unvoiced, within us. With words, we rebuild our disrupted sense of who we are to accommodate a new understanding. Sometimes, if it is passion that has taken hold of us, we feel impelled to construct the beloved in words. It is a way of making love – of taking possession, and also of paying due tribute.

For those of us who are lesbians, this engagement with language has been particularly tricky to negotiate. For us, the disruptive impact of sexual passion is likely to be fiercer, separating us out from family and friends, alienating us from whole areas of cultural tradition. There are old prohibitions on our speech, weaker now than they once were, but not yet dissolved. Certain words continue to be sites of conflict, weighted with contempt or embarrassment, hardly to be claimed in public without a measure of defiance. For just these reasons, finding language that voices what we feel and know may be even more crucial to nourishing our sense of who we are than it is for many others. And our survival may depend upon our assembling, more or less deliberately, a tradition of our own, out of what we can find available.

Many thanks to Gillian Spraggs for this fine assembly of poems from women whose voices are part of this long tradition of women loving women and speaking of their love.

Note: this book can be ordered from the editor, at this website