"The Wings of the Redwing Hawk": Poetic Depictions of Nonhuman Nature in Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home. Issue 2 (1st July 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Byrne, Deirdre C.
• Is Part Of: Extrapolation. Volume 63:Issue 2(2022)
• Page Start: 181
• Page End: 204
• Publication Date: 2022-07-01
• Subjects: Science fiction -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Science fiction -- Bibliography -- Periodicals; Science fiction; Bibliography; Criticism, interpretation, etc; Periodicals; 809.38762
• DOI: 10.3828/extr.2022.12
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0014-5483

Abstract

Abstract : Ursula K. Le Guin is well known and widely studied for her outstanding career as an author of speculative fiction. There is much less scholarly criticism of her poetry, which constitutes eleven volumes (Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust) and deserves sustained attention. This article explores one section of her poetry—the poems published in Always Coming Home (1986, hereafter ACH )—as a response to the environmental degradation that has been the hallmark of the past two centuries. I explore Le Guin's creative practices within the framework of her insistence on a flattened ontology where humans and nonhuman living beings enjoy equal status and humans' dependency on nonhuman nature is acknowledged. The article probes the status of the poems in an exceptionally innovative text, namely the imagined history of a people who "might be going to have lived a very long time from now in Northern California" ( ACH n.p.). In exploring Le Guin's view of human inter- and intra-actions with nonhuman animals, I also take note of the formal features of the poems which are intertwined with their semantic aspects.