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.
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.
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