[In the following review, Uschuk discusses the poetry of Le Guin's Sixty Odd in terms of its Taoist influences.]

Influenced by Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which Ursula K. Le Guin translated, this collection of sixty-nine poems is also linked to the divinatory hexagrams of the I Ching. Sixty Odd refers to Le Guin’s age as well as to poem count. In her preface, Le Guin divides the poems into two groups, “catching” and “following.” “Catching,” she explains, is “a desire to catch, to hold, surround, describe the sight, the emotion, the vision, a passionate desire that forces the words into poetry … a longing to make sense.” “Following,” she continues, “works by metaphor and without narrative.”

The strongest poems in this collection lie in the first section, “Circling to Descend.” Here metaphors can hunt with sharp talons, eerie as great horned owls, or bob odd little clown heads like the acrobatic acorn woodpeckers she is fond of. In “Field Burning Debates. Salmon Fate Discussed,” the images are passionate and powerful, her fierce love of nature bursting from the lines: “We are the desert god. / His left hand plucks from the burning / what his right hand burns” or “The god debates fate / while with his fingers he feeds his mouth / and eats the fingers one by one.” Her nature imagery is poignant and deceptively simple in “Late Dusk,” whose last line, “Say the light is beautiful, failing,” echoes one of her mentors, the great German metaphysical poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.

In an homage to another ancestor/mentor, “For Gabriela Mistral,” Le Guin’s dream imagery marches down the page in incantatory lines that plumb the mysteries of dualism and balance. The poem itself becomes one great circle.

If I walk south
with the ocean always on my right
and the mountains on my left,
swimming the mouths of the rivers,
the estuaries and the great canal,
if I walk from low tide to high tide,
and full moon to new moon, south,
and from equinox to solstice, south,
across the equator in a dream of volcanoes,
if I walk through all the tropics
past bays of amethyst and bays of jade
from April spring to April autumn, south,
and cross the deserts of niter and asbestos
with the sea silver on my right
and a hundred mountains on my left,
a hundred mountains, maybe more,
I will come to the valley.…
And I will speak your language.

Le Guin’s wry wit grounded in feminist polemics can be seen in poems like “Read at the May Award Dinner, 1996.” If you enjoy poetry uncluttered and utterly accessible, you will cheer this admonition to the deans of the Literati:

“Above all beware of honoring women artists. For the housewife will fill the house with lions and in with the grandmother come bears, wild horses, great horned owls, coyotes.”

Revelatory and fresh as individual images （“I am my ancestors’ sci fi”） can be, sometimes Le Guin’s poetry falls a bit flat. In “From Morning Poems,” for example, Elisabeth is described as “a rose among roses,” a cliché that might set the teeth of lions grinding. But Le Guin fans who admire the vistas of her creative genius will forgive these momentary lapses. In “Infinitive,” Le Guin writes,

We make too much of history,
But what we need to be
is, oh, the small talk of swallows
in evening over
dull water under willows.

revealing the complex Taoist perspective at work in her poems, a perspective that sharpens those same lions’ teeth.