One of the great pleasures in life for the litterateur is discovering a name then unknown, often but not always young, who has latched on to the ever-escaping kite of singular vision and is chasing its string through stanza and story as the ground beneath their apprenticeship shakes and undulates. Another is discovering that long-praised source, has not, under pressure from society and its wage slave harness, abandoned the high ground for the challenge free valley where the crutches of psychology, religion, anger or faith steady the questing spirit as it wobbles with endless tempting options.
A fitting example of the second is Karen Solie, whose latest collection Wellwater is offered to us from that plateau of esthetic achievement to which she ascended some years back and from which she has not lost her footing. From the award winning Pigeon, she has never faltered. Like many devoted practitioners who selflessly serve the cause of English Literature, her peripatetic life shifts from country to college and residence to rental as the lyrics continue their drip and pour from the springs of sudden inspiration. The life is lived, loved and oft-times detested as the oeuvre is uncovered and vision articulated. The reader feels the jabs and caresses.
The poems are essentially what we think of as occasional, shaped by moody reflections on those shameless vicissitudes of life as they run rough shod over delicate sensibilities. In that catalogue of occasions much is evoked in the struggle to see value resonating through the annoying aches and debilitating shocks. And those evocations are not evoked with William Blake’s ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’ but the generous embrace of all that living entails.
Meadowlark
Prayer in the throat of a nonbeliever
offered up to the absent hereafter,
his two long notes and descending warble
put him at the center of things.
A partial method he knows is no method;
and when you are too weak for beauty’s
startlement, when you desire not silence
But the peace of vague and benign
neglect, at decibels audible over
the wind, radio, tires through gravel,
through the open driver’s window
his song is like arrows of pure math,
straight into what ever the heart is,
its still unbroken land, its native grasses.
Orion
Smoking in the yard two weeks before Christmas
Out of the wind, under Orion,
Inhaling anger, exhaling sorrow,
Which is how anger metabolizes,
The end product always a sorrow
Of remorse or failure. I would gibe this anger
To Orion, whom I’ve only recently learned to identify,
Forever on his back foot, his stories go
From bad to worse, the benzene rises
Like a prayer, arsenic on the breath
Cold makes visible, that makes visible
The cold. A wider range of words exists
To describe effects of cold than heat.
Where somatosensory modalities are concerned
Its one of the more ambiguous precepts.
Being cold is not the same as feeling cold,
Just as Seneca, who wrote on anger,
said it’s different to know a thing
than to feel its truth.
……
One could try to filter anger
as a plant might, then through a coarsely woven
logic, then as would a machine
whose selling points are that it’s cheap
and nearly silent, and still be
unequal to it, smoke rising
to Orion, and my friend, who was not immune
to anger, says I need to look past
the constellation, he can see farther than he ever has -
beyond the Horsehead, De Mairan’s Nebula,
through hallways of stellar nurseries,
beyond pattern (is it is a pattern), and colour
(if it is a colour), beyond narrative, he says, Okay
I’m being practical now, there is a clearing.
Wellwater continues Solie’s uncompromising path, or should I say paths, as themes are expanded and attitudes recur in patterns as precise as they are puzzling, enigmas to be entered. The wide open prairie with its prayers and punishments, the claustrophobic decay of the urban forest, both have yet to lose their hold on the child of one and the orphan of the other. That short haul engine still knows that the way in is not the same as the way out. On occasion the reader feels inclined to impose some conceptual frame which might for a moment cage the ever shifting tones and textures that discussion might be enabled. Yet the magic of the verbal music seems to always win out, even as the precision of reference keeps the linguistic carnival of a Stevens or Ashbery at bay. One delights in being taken prisoner and being shown the ropes that run the stage props. So this is how its done, we say as our feet slide out from some efficient floor of enduring beauty.
Today as I sit by the lake’s whooshing surf as poem after poem etches their singular expressions on the gallery walls of my psyche, I am delightfully torn between words as music and nature as enchanter, wishing the troubled world might join me in the moment’s magic, yet knowing that the poem in situ is the only portal possible and that Solie is surely one of its most eminently admirable practitioners.
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up on the family farm in southwest Saskatchewan, Canada. She is the author of five collections of poetry. Short Haul Engine (Brick Books, 2001) won the Dorothy Livesay Award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005) was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Prize. Pigeon (Anansi, 2009) won the Pat Lowther Award, Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Griffin Prize. The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, FSG, 2014) was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. The Caiplie Caves (Anansi, Picador, 2019; FSG, 2020) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Derek Walcott Prize. Her selected poems, The Living Option, published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2013, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has received the Latner Poetry Prize and the Canada Council for the Arts Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for an artist in mid-career. The 2021 Jack McClelland Writer in Residence for the University of Toronto, and the 2022 Holloway Visiting Poet for the University of California at Berkeley, she is currently a lecturer in creative writing with the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Publisher: House Of Anansi (April 1st 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ (112 pp)
ISBN: 9781487013400
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