The best recent poetry – review roundup

<p>So Far So Good by Ursula K Le Guin; Thrums by Thomas A Clark; Sculling by Sophie Dumont; Magadh by Shrikant Verma</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/so-far-so-good-9781068591822/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">So Far So Good</a> by Ursula K Le Guin</strong><strong> (Spiral House, £13.99)<br></strong>The title of this final book, sent to her publisher in January 2018, a week before she died, might look ironic, but with a writer like Le Guin you can’t be too sure. Her science fiction is full of journeys to different worlds, and many of these poems reference journeys too, both in this world and into the next. After the Death of Orpheus imagines Orpheus, after being torn apart by the Maenads, casually making his way down the track to the underworld, where he sees a slight figure waiting for him, Euridice. Other poems are more earthly, focusing on cattle, birds, a mouse killed by her cat, but even this smallest of creatures, as it’s carried to the trash, is given a soul by Le Guin. Cows calling for their calves from the train that takes them to the abattoir are “your sisters”. Landscapes are here too, sometimes under threat, sometimes evoked with beautiful simplicity, as in Autumn: “gold of amber / red of ember / brown of umber / all September”. Images of death in nature inevitably lead back to age and mortality, sometimes accepted as part of the natural process, elsewhere angrily resented, as in the poem about the death of Le Guin’s mother Theodora. Yet it is her own impending death which increasingly takes centre stage in the closing meditations on “extreme age”, hope mingling with despair as the body declines, approaching the end where “the wire / gets higher / and they forget / the net”.</p><p><strong><a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/thrums-9781800175204/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=m