Karen Solie, Wellwater: poems

 

BERKELEY HILLS, 2022

In Wildcat Canyon live the laurels.
No rain in two months and nine days.
Like girls do, the laurels grow
from the soil of a deep reserve.

Inside their frivolity they gather
themselves, still dropping
folded notes onto the others’ open books,

though now they are doing it
underground. They cool their feet
in the pool of their own shade.

When a leaf is plucked from one
the others rustle their clothes.

When that leaf is crushed in the hand
its fragrance calls back to the grove.

The latest by award-winning Canadian poet and editor Karen Solie [see my 2016 interview with her here], following Short Haul Engine (London ON: Brick Books, 2001), Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), Pigeon (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2009) [see my review of such here], The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, 2015), The Living Option: Selected Poems (Northumberland UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and The Caiplie Caves (Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here], is Wellwater: poems (Anansi, 2025). Solie is a curiosity in Canadian poetry, one of the few poets of her (our) generation that sees broader attention in other counties, with books and journal publications regularly in the United Kingdom (including a selected published there, for example), and her work has, over the years, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Pat Lowther Award, Trillium Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize, as well as been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She’s also a Guggenheim Fellow, which make for an even shorter list across Canadian poetry—the only other examples I can think of are A.L. Moritz, Tim Bowling and Anne Carson. And all of this done, of course, with a quiet and modest confidence across the depths of a Saskatchewan lyric.

Solie has long been able to craft a contained and sustained tone across her poems; crafting a scene of familiar landscapes with new or renewed depth through carved lines and a narrative that appears direct but is something thicker, more complex. Her lines are striking, such as the opening of the poem “THE TREES IN RIVERDALE PARK,” that reads: “Diagonal paths quadrisect a square acre / white as the page in February.” Her line is loaded, but with unexpected elements, offering a different kind of effect than the mere straightforward. How white, one might ask, is the February page? As the poem continues, writing:

In the soil of this basic geometry
ash, elm, and maple thrive like understandings
whose bare logics are visible,
understandings the theorem has allowed.

Between roam bodies of the sensible world –
people, dogs, all those lovers
of the material and immaterial

illuminated, as under working hypotheses,
by sodium bulbs whose costly inefficiencies
Los Angeles and Philadelphia have apparently
moved on from.

Solie is very good at crafting a scene with intricate nuance and unexpected turns, whether image or narrative, and this collection offers poems that hold to the tight image-scene, with others that open up across the narrative a bit more, allowing air through the lines across a greater narrative and lyric distance. Listen to this excerpt of the three-page poem “LAS CRUCES,” a poem that holds a quality of filmed narrative, of landscape:

In our morning’s suffering at Texico
B— found a snake, a black-necked snake,
against the wall of Red’s Border Town Playorama,
said he’d get what lay in the glove box to kill it
but it was harmless and afraid.
            I had always pitied the snake
beneath the foot of the Blessed Virgin,
it looked to me vulnerable to misrepresentation,
but B— said enmities
had been established between them, that purity
is not a passive quality, and Mary, like the bridge
in the Song of Songs, is bright as the sun,
lovely as the moon,

Solie’s poems offer both deep wisdom and a lightness across the line; a sparkle, if you will, of truth, if that idea might still be one that holds any resonance: the heart of one true thing articulated across an otherwise landscape of dark. Her poems craft deep wells of meditative thinking, lines that turn a leaf over in one’s hand, to study every side.

The landscapes of her poem-scenes are solid, foundational; shifting from poem to poem but always returning, book after book, to the foundation of the people, physical detail, climate and intimacy of rural Saskatchewan, a sense of home and prairie Solie has in common with Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers [see my review of her latest collection here]: the further out either of them might move through the world, the stronger the pull to return back to the landscapes that shaped them. As Solie writes, as part of the extended and descriptive “THE GRASSLANDS”: “And when you do venture in / with your tire tracks and snake gaiters //  the hospitality of grass / is a dry loaf, cracked cup, mattress of prairie wool, / northern bedstraw and great blanket flower, / wild licorice, clover, corn mint, bergamot, // and heat, rippling like curtains / as the grasshoppers saw away – / leave your packed lunch out they will eat it in an hour – [.]”

There is almost a kind of restlessness articulated through these poems, with an inability to remain still even across multiple poems on and around stillness, but rarely in the same geography, the same moment, beyond that aforementioned Saskatchewan (and Toronto, I’ve noticed). The poems, together, cite a restlessness, or perhaps a curiosity, perpetually seeking to reach across another horizon to seek a better understanding of what might be out there, whether through moments across geography, or even across the narrator’s own past. It it the clarity, one suspects, she seeks. “An empty bottle rolled under the passenger seat / and back out again // as my grandfather drove,” the poem “DUST” writes, “one foot on the gas, one on the brake, // it was a clear glass bottle with white lettering, / and a sense of the conditional crept in through the vents // like dust, the incense of the road / scrubbing the air of clarity, of all eels but the demands of dust, // what you need replaced / with what you don’t – you are ignored // by everything as you struggle with it.” It is through, one might suggest, these moments together, that we might best know and appreciate these poems. Or, as the poem “MIRROR” concludes:

And it can take some time to understand what side of the mirror you’re on.
Etymology is itself hospitable,

like a brief stay in hospital, somewhere to rest, to recover.
Perhaps basic hospitality was enough for her.
Because if you decide something is enough, it’s enough.

Ongoing notes: late December, 2023 : Karen Solie, Paola Ferrante + HR Hegnauer,

Another year, another what? And so it goes; if you can imagine, The Factory Reading Series will be turning thirty-one years old in January (keep your eyes out for another event come the new year), and above/ground press as well, by the summer. Madness! Just what might 2024 bring? And hey, publishers should be mailing me more chapbooks! I’m really not seeing enough these days.

Montreal QC: I was very intrigued to see a chapbook by Karen Solie, WELLWATER (2023), produced as “Vallum Chapbook Series No. 37” by Montreal’s Vallum magazine. Solie is a writer that doesn’t seem to publish chapbooks that often, and I don’t think I’m aware, offhand, of any by her over the years save for those days prior to the publication of her debut, her chapbook Eating Dirt (1998) that appeared with Victoria chapbook publisher Smoking Lung Press (although a quick Google search offers that a further chapbook, Retreats, appeared with Toronto’s Junction Books in 2017). Otherwise, Solie is the author of six full-length collections: Short Haul Engine (London ON: Brick Books, 2001), Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), Pigeon (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2009) [see my review of such here], The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, 2015), The Living Option: Selected Poems (Northumberland UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and The Caiplie Caves (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Solie writes of basement suites, landscapes, foxes, and trees of a particular park, offering echoes of content familiar to anyone who follows her work; first-person lyric observations finely honed and crafted across a line any bird, to paraphrase Don McKay, would trust to light upon. As the poem “THE TREES IN RIVERDALE PARK” begins: “Diagonal paths quadrisect a square acre / white as the page in February.”

The fourteen poems in WELLWATER offer a curious grouping: as much as Solie is an author of individually-crafted lyric narrative poems, her collections offer an ebb and flow of deliberately-structured book-length compositions, and a shorter selection, then, moves in a slightly different manner; enough that I am curious to see how these poems interact with the book that might eventually come (her author biography does offer that a new collection is due to land in 2025). “I can’t make it right. Not the shadow lying on the snow,” she writes, to open the poem “BAD LANDSCAPE,” “not the snow, terrain sloping crudely toward / the poor outcome of a structure neither representational / nor abstract, and the sketched-out town beyond / ill-proportioned, depthless, and basic. There isn’t any sense / of an origin, of what Plato called the lower soul, / to animate what’s lacking with the spark of its / remainder.”

Toronto ON: Another title I picked up not long ago from Toronto publisher and poetry bookseller knife|fork|book [see my prior notes on other titles from the past few months here and here and here] is Toronto writer Paola Ferrante’s THE DARK UNWIND (2022) [see her recent ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], a chapbook of poems wrapped in lyric anxieties, climate change and the Anthropocene. “The dinosaurs that didn’t die went slamming into windows,” the poem “Descendants” begins, “dazzled / by the colour of a gold. Instead of flight, they had their houses built / on tree tops, over many single blades of grass; they learned to run / on fossils of their dead.” Wrapped in cultural markers and large-scale historical trauma, this assemblage of first-person narrative lyrics an intriguing offering, and one, I hope, that will lead into a follow-up to her poetry debut from a couple of years back. There’s an increased sharpness to her lyrics, and clear evidence of a honed line and fine eye. Listen to the ending of the opening poem, “Asch’s Line Study In The Current Anthropocene,” that reads: “Before the river in the sky became a mudslide, / we stood for elevator talk about the weather as though we’d never / tried to buy the rain, as though the rain was not canaries, slamming / into windows. We chose, but stood in grocery lines and talked of / whether, as though we could still choose a time to see, as though / we’d get to choose when the power would go out.”

Brooklyn NY: Another title lost upon my desk until a recent mini-excavation is Excerpts from CONTRADITION AND NIGHT : GRACE (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2021) by Denver, Colorado poet and designer HR Hegnauer, published by Brooklyn poet, writer, editor and publisher (etcetera) Brenda Iijima. Hegnauer is a poet I’ve been aware of for some time but hadn’t yet read, author of the full-length collections Sir (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2013) and When the Bird Is Not a Human (Subito Press, 2018), as well as a handful of chapbooks, none of which I’ve seen, and now, curious as to why her work wouldn’t have made it across my radar before. Set in two sections, this work-in-progress excerpt offers the opening section “CONTRADICTION,” subtitled “To speak against,” a cluster of individually-numbered and repeated “DAY” poems, followed by the section “GRACE,” subtitled “The unmeried divine,” a cluster of individually-numbered and repeated “Thought” poems. As the opening piece to the short collection reads:

DAY 1

Life is like a small bus in the desert of your human. You can’t feel the heat unless you’re standing in the dirt. In which case you must ask yourself, would you like to stand in the dirt?

I look out the window towards the desert. Black walnut, organ pipe, saguaro, jumping cholla, sage, brittle brush, globe mallow, fish hook barrel, prickly pear, ocotillo. Scorpion, rattlesnake, collared lizard, horned lizard, fox, rabbit, coyote. I can’t see the people.

Hegnauer’s website describes this chapbook as “vignette essays,” which I’m curious about; intrigued, even. I’m curious, also, about the divide between “CONTRADICTION” and “GRACE,” between “DAYS” and “THOUGHT,” wishing to know a bit more about what makes those divisions, those divides. And where the presumably-eventual full-length collection might meet amid those clear demarcations. “It’s the sparseness that’s so loud here.” she writes, to open “DAY 5,” “Look up, look across the / desert. All that emptiness shows me at least twelve miles of itself, but / putting measurements in the desert is not a natural thing to do.” There is an enormous amount going on in these pieces, and these poem-essays are as deeply thoughtful as her lines are striking. As the poem “Thought 6” reads, in full:

“How do you say? My family hung themselves because too much torture,” you say.

Six nights by truck. Now it is time to walk. Get out and walk.

Om mani padme hum.

“Okay. Where does the sun set? Okay. We’ll go that way.”

A bit of yak butter to eat.

“Our eyes became sick. Because of the snow and the sun. You know, eye sick.”

Om mani padme hum.

“If we die, then we die together. But if we are life, then we are life together.”

Thirteen years old. Om mani padme hum. Where does the sun set?

Karen Solie, The Caiplie Caves

NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W

Landward, the cave mouth conspicuously dark.

Halfway between Anstruther and Crail,

singular in the vicinity. Prominent

calcareous sandstone outcrop on a raised beach

level, short lengths of passage

and as spectacularly weathered as the coexistence

of good and evil, the earth pigments.

Anchor in five metres, taking care to avoid

the numerous creel markers. At half-tide

a dinghy may be hauled out where the reef buffers

flat rocks, though they are sharp

and landing delicate, if land you must.

Wind may complicate return to the boat. Any visit

is a lesson in how quickly conditions change.

What is immediately fascinating about Toronto poet and editor Karen Solie latest full-length collection, The Caiplie Caves (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019), is how it is built: more than a collection thematically or structurally shaped, but a singular, book-length work constructed around a core idea. As the press release offers:

In the seventh century, on the coast of Fife, Scotland, an Irish missionary named Ethernan withdrew to a cave in order to decide whether to establish a priory on May Island, directly opposite, in the Firth of Forth, or pursue a hermit’s solitude. His decision would have been informed by the realities of war, religious colonization, and ideas of progress, power, and corruption, and complicated by personal interest, grief, confusion, and a faith (religious and secular) under extreme duress.

What becomes interesting about this shift is one of approach, as Solie evolves, more overtly, from a writer who crafts poems into collections into a writer who crafts a collection constructed out of individual poems; becoming, at least for this singular project, a poet utilizing the book as her unit of composition. That isn’t to suggest that her prior collections—Short Haul Engine (London ON: Brick Books, 2001), Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), Pigeon (Anansi, 2009) and TheRoad In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, 2015), as well as The Living Option: Selected Poems (Northumberland UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]—aren’t conceived as or don’t hold together as book-units, but the difference remains on The Caiplie Caves’’ focus on both a historical figure, the hermit Ethernan, and the remote Caves of Caiplie, where he chose to contemplate, situated north of Edinburgh along the country’s eastern coast. As Solie writes of the historically-evasive Ethernan as part of her preface: “A number suggest he was an Irish missionary to Scotland who withdrew to the Caves in the mid-7^th century in order to decide whether to commit to a hermit’s solitude or establish a priory on May Island. This choice, between life as a ‘contemplative’ or as an ‘active,’ was not an unusual one to take up among his cohort.” The poems use the contemplation of that choice, between a contemplative versus an active life, as a way to speak both to what is believed to be Ethernan’s historical context as well as contemporary concerns, asking what, indeed, denotes activity, and examining the unexamined life, as in the poem “ORIGIN STORY,” that includes:

To make our own the righteous anger

that keeps some people alive

feels like doing something

so grief and fear don’t stir

under their blanket, don’t open their eyes.

So survival does not seem merely accidental

to the indecision when to lay down

the earthly burdens, the way a quality is accidental

to a substance —

In an interview conducted by Daniel Fraser and posted September 28, 2018 at The Rumpus, she speaks to the tension in her work between the relationship, as Fraser suggests, between nature and human life:

The Rumpus: I want to start by asking you about what appears to me to be one of the prevailing tensions in your poems: the relationship between nature and human life. More specifically, the sense of nature as a force that lurks beneath modernity and continually breaks through the surface.

Karen Solie: I suppose I see the tension not in terms of forces at odds, but in the belief that human endeavor is separate from the natural world. We are natural creatures, and all creatures alter their environments. I suspect that separating the natural from the “man-made” has allowed us to distance ourselves, to neglect the implications of our technology, to compartmentalize our responsibility.

We can see the surface of Mars now (and leave junk there), but down here our problem-solving has been narrowed by power interests. If human life and nature are distinct entities, it allows us to prioritize. Prioritizing “progress” has served colonial enterprises very well. If we think of nature and the human as each going about its business, we can more easily rationalize climate change as an acceptable cost; or, in an absurd extension of this, insist that it has nothing to do with us, that islands of plastic in the ocean don’t exist. It allows us to treat wilderness as a playground, to exoticize people we characterize as closer to it, who we then associate with acceptable costs.

“Nature” is that which “feeds our souls,”  which seems an apt metaphor. Remember that Simpsons’ episode in which a classroom filmstrip diagram of “The Food Chain” shows arrows from all creatures pointing to the human’s stomach? Once in awhile we are forced into awareness of our place in the system, the fact that we are not the end point in the food chain. As climate and environmental events have demonstrated, we don’t have the last word. The fastest and easiest response to this fact is avoidance or hysterical denial. So, in what little poetry—my poetry, anyway—can do, I hope to keep alive, or at least gesture toward, the tension of complexity, complication, responsibility.

Solie writes of isolation, the slippery structures of human interactions, violence and tragedy, and what might cause both body and soul to retreat. “Hatred is a plotting emotion,” she writes, in the poem “KENTIGERN AND THE ROBIN”: “and gleefully inclusive.” She writes the landscape and weather as physical characters, sometimes violent and occasionally overpowering, but also capable of great empathy, capable of providing refuge. While it is entirely speculation on my part, I know, I wonder if there is a correlation between the contemplative life that Ethernan considered, seeking insight on the role and responsibilities of the individual, especially in regards to a spiritual life, and Solie herself, who has famously participated in numerous residencies and retreats over the years, some of which have been full-on retreats (as opposed to a straight residency, which includes interacting with student writers). [CORRECTION/EDIT: Karen Solie points out that she has never actually attended or participated in a writer's retreat] And to step further into that argument, what becomes the role of poetry and the poet when climate change and politics overwhelm both conversation and the news cycle? Perhaps these questions are unanswerable, or miss the point entirely. Still: when one is removed, even slightly, from one’s normal world, it can be easier to catch the fuller picture of that world, allowing an insight that might have been otherwise missed, as she writes in the poem “THE SHAGS, WHOSE CONSERVATION STATUS IS ‘OF LEAST / CONCERN’”:

On vertebral rock near Caiplie Caves

like shreds of an outline or shadows freed

of their antecedents, they dry their wings,

eyes closed, faces to the sun. Centre of no

universe, they have the run of the great ancillary.

Through likely they loom large in the imagination

of the sand eel whose peripheries

they torment. As their shouting did mine

wee hours in the silt of my own domain before

the chicks fledged, presumably, the parents

moved on. And I missed them then, as we do

the ones loved best when not around.

Gord Downie (February 6, 1964 – October 17, 2017)

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Gordon Edgar Downie, poet, lyricist and front-man for The Tragically Hip, has died. How much can I add? What can I say that might even be relevant?

His sense of Canadian wasn’t nationalistic, but openly inclusive, passionate, critical and uniquely lyric. There was a generosity and attentiveness to him that was quite remarkable. He worked to make us better, more aware and closer to each other.

Christine and I watched that final show on the CBC last year and were transfixed, in awe of what the Hip had accomplished over their tenure, and amazed at how CBC was aware enough to capture such an important cultural moment, both live and commercial-free.

The summer after the publication of his poetry collection, Coke Machine Glow (2001), he came through Ottawa to finally launch the book at an event hosted by the ottawa international writers festival. He opened his reading to an audience of some three hundred plus to a poem of mine, from my collection bagne: or Criteria for Heaven (Broken Jaw Press, 2001). I was floored.

Apparently at the Ottawa Book Awards ceremony the other night, Sean Wilson mentioned the look on my face as this happened. I can’t even imagine, or recall. I know throughout the reading, Gord read poems by four other poets: David O’Meara, Karen Solie, Al Purdy and Elizabeth Bishop. I hope I’m remembering that correctly. The on-stage interview was conducted by Ken Babstock.

I was already aware of a recommendation he’d made, via the Chapters.ca website (a post long disappeared). He’d been asked to recommend other first poetry titles by Canadian titles, and mentioned my first collection alongside first collections by Paul Vermeersch and, I think, Babstock and Solie as well (the list is hazy now in my recollections).

Prior to the event, as Sean and I stood in the National Archives, we spotted Neil Wilson and Gord Downie walking toward us from the entranceway, Gord holding up a copy of my book as they approached. How, I asked myself, was this happening?

After the reading, we walked with Gord into the Byward Market for drinks, and some of us took turns wearing his jean jacket; like teenagers. He seemed amused by us.

The following night, he’d left tickets for a number of us for the Blues Festival show the Hip were doing. I took my daughter Kate, and we ended up in the V.I.P. section, where she was able to meet opening performer Sarah Harmer. Kate and I walked home on air, stopping for pizza on Bank Street around midnight (the first we’d walked more than half a block without my preteen child complaining I needed a car).

It was a baffling generosity by a man who clearly had an enormous amount of time, attention and energy for everyone around him. He made things better wherever he went, and as much as he could, including, even in the months following his diagnosis, giving an incredible amount of attention to helping others.

The likes of him will not be soon this way again. Godspeed, Mr. Downie. You will be missed.