Half a dozen books deep, it should be apparent what Karen Solie, with something like bemused wincing, is likely to take note of: late-model vehicles and actuarial tables, but also spring-fed lakes and tar sands; guest appearances by the devil (who might as well be a slick executive) that follow a vole clearing its throat or “rabbits / los[ing] their keys” in the twisting alleys of a spruce’s roots; vaguely threatening abbreviations like PVC and CCTV, with the odd comment about polyester or debt. This dual focus on extractive capitalism and nature’s increasing fragility, on the former’s slow violence against the latter and its respective citizenry (“But what good is a place left on its own? // Oil and gas companies say, not much”), has been her artistic crucible since the publication of Short Haul Engine (2001). It’s said that Solie’s poetry is philosophical without being philosophy, though it comes close at times: “A thing is what it is called,” she declared in The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2015), a shout-out to sociological theory that doubles as an elegy for the West’s (or the North’s) imaginative poverty. Seemingly impassable, this age of things — costly things “no one needs, / thus satisfying the criteria for beauty,” industrial, tax-exempt things left to rust, like “a derelict potato chip factory” — becomes tantamount to life mummified, or undergoing museumification, evident in a luxury cruise as much as the gray landscape one commutes through. Caught between inanimate stuff and human existence, animals fall into a middle category of teleological self-definition. “Above the harbour,” notices Solie, “a gull creates flight / as flight has created him. He arises / and results from his work.” Yet it cuts two ways, “unresolvable, but mutual.” The gull is what he does. What are we?
The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out provided, in ironic X-rays of our societal unconscious, a kind of diagnosis. “Blue jay vocalizes a clash on the colour / wheel,” runs the book’s fragmentary opening clause, while the subsequent poem defines its title, “The Corners,” straight off as “Where the question are you alright usually finds one very much / not alright.” Solie’s jaded, skeptic’s gaze comes fused with each poem’s content, delivered through it, and machined into place. But she’s not above a bit of mysticism plucked from the works of Wittgenstein (“Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present”) or Epicurus. Solie is wryly receptive to modernity’s hilarious paradoxes and monstrous logic, “its decorative plantings and contradictory signage.” One laughs without understanding and cries to keep from weeping. Flags inch caterpillar-like up their aluminum poles and storefronts, like sheep dogs, wear spiked collars. Solie’s ability to articulate disorientation, what is basically unthinkable (“His bell rings out from the twelfth century / to a neighbourhood traumatizing / food with dull knives”), once astonished, as did the imagery, like the comparison of a crowd holding its phones to a clove-studded ham or her conception of sunset as the horizon shutting its eye.
The abundance of “contemporary glibspeak,” meanwhile, as Michael Hofmann has phrased it, amounts to a sort of cross-wiring, though the result can also be surreally zippered (“Four-stroke my electronica. [. . .] East wind my ibuprofen”). Linguistic incongruities seep through, an almost osmotic process that touches the corporate pollution of language as much as Lake Ontario. The goal, in other words, of making art when little that is given to us makes any sense at all isn’t necessarily enlightenment (“We can acknowledge the tulip’s beauty without eating / its poisonous bulb”); like Eliot’s Fisher King, Solie shores against continual ruin. What she roots for is less global revolution than the local and the small, from neighborhood laundromats and family grocers, lost to agglomeration and monied interests if not disinterest, to a rebellious octopus. Purity is illusory, for, as we’re told, “The market writes its autobiography on / minds and bodies.” While purposeful, her adoption of obfuscating loquacity — a much-thumbed page in the playbook of corporations and politicians — is frequently comic, as when Solie, in a poem about construction equipment on Sunday, refers to the possibility of a gas-line explosion as “the inadvertent manufacture / of larger holes.”
What you typically get is an effervescent cynicism, one which looks on dislocation and pseudo-activity (“They are shopping / in the Dixie Mall because their cars are there. / They’re working in pharmaceutical company offices / because their cars are there”) with equal parts sarcasm and despair. If that sarcasm takes the form of mock-solemn jargon, you might hear, too, sincerity, Solie’s base note. It’s the fatiguing condition of both giving a shit and not, of needing to communicate without taking part. “It gets so you don’t want to talk about it,” she writes, “though the air is thick with personal messaging.” The creep of gentrification leaves convenience, but also hurriedness, in its greige wake. In Canada, even the psychics are busy as spiritual destitution competes with the material kind for dominance, becoming “modern and normal.” As Theodor Adorno once wrote — in Los Angeles, of all places — what the car fanatic actually desires is their own homelessness. So The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out begins and ends with a photograph of a Buick left in a meadow. The lots of big-box developments are at capacity. Newborn coupes are cradled with razor wire and lit overnight by sodium lamps.
If The Caiplie Caves (2019), about a medieval hermit on the Scottish coast, seems, in hindsight, startlingly prognostic,
We weren’t poisoned,
we were the infected crop passing alkaloids
among ourselves, salivating
the honeydew inoculum and spitting
when we talked, incubating the deformity
that falls to the soil, becomes the soil, the pathogen
our conditions were right for
by contrast Wellwater, Solie’s latest, more than nods at the pandemic, as was inevitable given the mountain of cooped-up scribbling produced at the time. That existential crisis shrugged off by world leaders which remains with us: our strangely indefinite past. Wellwater starts underground, appropriately enough, in a house basement, with Solie contemplating varying species of weevil and the sharpening effect darkness has on one’s vision (I’m reminded of Theodore Roethke’s “Root Cellar”). What is funny in a Solie poem, like what may be unexpectedly moving, nearly always results from either delayed or inverted syntax, like the anastrophic “I’d stopped at / a roadside motel whose name ameliorated // the experience of staying there / not at all,” or a swerve of vernacular, some remark whose frankness catches you up short:
When those who will ruin us are elected,
where is everyone?
And when I return from the desert it’s with the Devil
cast out. With God cast out. Because it wasn’t really me
who did those things before, that wasn’t me.
The remarks are often doubly topical, simultaneously a comment on Solie’s history and, say, that of the planet. There’s the divorce poem, which opens with legal papers and ends with a leased apartment; the rat poem (“unlike you I’m ashamed / of what I do, which is nothing”), which — fittingly? — is a triptych; the innately Canadian poem about watching a winter plow hump an empty parking garage’s slush of snowed-over trash.
After the field trips to abandoned mining towns and lines that intentionally read like ad copy (“it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360”), watch for dated terminological slippages (“shuffling our documents as though judgement weren’t already written / in the Cloud”), some truly unambitious puns (“The trees are grand hotels closed for the season”), and expressions that, while attractively declarative, just aren’t true. Only a troglodyte, for instance, would agree that “No one plans for rain / until the rain falls.” Disappointingly, what Jana Prikryl, in a New York Review of Books conversation, characterized as Solie’s “restlessness in trying to find new subjects, and to work in new ways, in successive books,” appears to be running on a quarter tank. That restlessness now comes off, not as white-hot indignation, but a Shelleyan joylessness that finds no object worth the thought. “There isn’t any sense / of an origin,” writes Solie — a legitimate grievance, something flammable — “to animate what’s lacking with the spark of its remainder.” It is a shift from what seemed like justified ire to crabby grumbling as Solie fumes at everything from an act of mass hypnosis and Bayer to, hilariously, the scent of “vulgar muffins” wafting in from a coffee shop. (The Canadian edition of Wellwater, somebody’s etching of an uprooted shrub.) Brands of weed killer are called out like a herd of trademarked reindeer, but each superscripted symbol more resembles a glued-on bullseye, shortchanging the poet’s anger. A noise complaint is lodged with an apologetic concierge, while doctors smokescreen her symptoms with “a mist of advice about hormones.” Solie’s comparison of herself, in the same poem, to a Yeatsian glade of bees is certainly a downgrade from her former gadfly attitude.
Inexperience, whether of the lived or practical kind, is no defense. A girl will be silently derided for thinking a figure skater had looked at her or the painter responsible for a family portrait knocked for their apparent “lack / of an artistic capacity for leaves. How sad, // I thought”; then, with begrudging acknowledgement, the artist is said to have spent on the sitter “if not talent, at least the attention / that might confirm a person as briefly among the living.” The familiar cynicism, elsewhere so apropos the author’s targets, as well as humorous, has come to parody itself. Except you worry that Solie isn’t in on her own joke, as when the “Auntie, do you know what?” of a wide-eyed nephew is initially dismissed with a flood of verbosity as “the voice assumes / a switched-on hydraulic quality.” It’s a set up — the adult surprised by a child’s guilelessness with an insight — few readers are going to fall for:
And I said What,
expecting a load of nonsense about cartoons,
trucks, the dog, or the recitation
of a poorly communicated half truth
misheard in school, having never believed children possess
an essential knowledge or intuition
that age, like water, like wind, erodes,
in ignorance recast as innocence
by all the insipid diocese of wellness
in spite of the very obvious reasons
our factory settings are reprogrammed,
and the sooner the better, actually,
I’ve been a child —
“I’m sorry,” she apologizes in propria persona, “I can’t make this beautiful.”
The nervy musing we learned to expect from a Solie poem has started to get in its own way. What used to be fiercely piquant about her language, the carefully selected techno-governmental vocabulary peppering her descriptions, has begun to act like packing peanuts. “It’s obvious now where this is going,” you think, knowing more by this point about critical growth regulators and yield-loss coverage than a Monsanto rep, or noting how the thinnest metonymies are built out of math and physics vocab. Art undertaken for the maintenance of a highly developed muscle has a lethargic, so-what ring to it, “which leads / to some uncertainty as to where the fault lies”; the same pinatas as ever are batted at enervatedly. Sometimes, at least. Solie’s tone has long been psychologically ambiguous, “[a]s if,” she writes, “any of us would want to choose just one thing.” Technical language is by definition sincere, whereas its adoption is certain to be anything but. She’s no saboteur, however, for the mysticism of expertise belongs equally to calculus as it does to land management or a coke plant. Though it is an inclination of Solie’s to describe the world outside as a lot of soft machinery, where animals “rattle and creak like // prototypes,” their insides compared with a V8 engine. Wellwater — two parts Silent Spring, one part Book of Ephraim — is dedicated to the memory of her late father and includes a number of poems which séance the dead in scatterings of italics. That metaphysical slant, when it materializes, imparts such cryptic wisdom as “look past / the constellation” and “Listen to the sea.”
Wellwater’s supporting cast, between pronouncements of vaguely biblical import (“Whoever has no house now, will never have one,” “The last shall be first”), are mostly referred to by dashed-out nominals, like the place names in old Russian novels. Meanwhile, the remembered glimpses of Solie’s adolescence, rare as they are, happen to some of the collection’s highlights:
Returning home from evening mass
in the big car,
they were like canal boats then
sliding through the loose gravel, in the back seat
she pushed my cuticles up
with a silver file, not unpainfully,
to expose the half moons, she said
God put them there, he likes to see them.
“Holiday at the Wave Pool,” a throwback to golden Solie and a poem with a perfect title, has her firing (a painful cliché, but an apt one) on all cylinders. Little else in Wellwater manages her gifts — the empathy for what most would consider humiliatingly suburban, the deadpan humor and wry asides — with such uncomplicated grace:
Warmish, oft-bathed-in, pride
of the second-most visited and largest mall
by gross leasable area
on the northern subcontinent, was it not,
in a childhood when travel meant Edmonton,
astonishing, a wonder of the world?
And on the other side of the intervening years
during which acknowledgment was sought,
sometimes deserved, and occasionally won,
when individuality hardened the heart and mysteries
into problems, is it not a respite from the buses in March,
from all the falling, and soothing to the shoulders
and the knees? Stroll without your heavy coat
along the ice-free corporate boulevards
out of the wind, road salt, the violently arbitrary
real, and get your steps in, you in the light
of your living, you one-off among
the wings’ repeating franchises, we of the just looking, thanks —
can we dance inside a little to the serviceable pop,
cry when it’s sad in front of everybody?
[. . .]
A water feature beneath potted trees
who’ve unfocused their eyes forever
is a place to enjoy without buying, like nature.
Pretty decent. It could be worse.
About right, one assumes, for a late bloomer from a town called Moose Jaw. These days Solie shuttles peripatetically between Canada and Scotland, where she teaches each fall; that is, like Ethernan, the Caiplie hermit, but also Giovanni Maria de Agostini, a 19th-century wanderer murdered by a priest in Taos (“to not see the fire / at the mouth of his cave come the evening / [the evening, forgive us] / was to understand that he had perished”). Solie’s humdrum beginnings, the daughter of farmers, are given figural expression in equal proportion to Wellwater’s biographical parallels. A belated apology — “I would have liked // to have offered my kindness as freely to you” — might follow from a meditation on the prolificacy of yarrow, while in the seemingly benign tale of a tenacious climbing vine Solie’s whole maturation is told to us in code, and not without lingering resentment:
From rocky soil it came
from next to nothing
stretched on the rack of its genome
the pain of its talent running through it
embracing the legs of the decking for comfort
Unidentified no immediate family
exiled from the chatter of annual plantings
not much in common with the cavalier flowering perennials
Even the sun said Whoever you are
I am not made of money
Everything it owned strapped to its body
arm over arm in its wet clothes
it hauled itself to the second-floor balcony
and where it spread out redistributed its weight
like a traveler on a platform
the structure’s joints creaked
and the muscles stood out in the nails
Had they let it it would have scaled the house
to stand on the roof where God might notice
what had been accomplished in his absence
From the semi-itinerant to interplanetary antelope “sleeping minutes at a time under the shaking rings of Saturn,” Wellwater is rife with displacement of both the ecological and human kind, whereas a rhetorical like “What compels someone [. . .] to leave where he is loved,” addressed to Agostini, could just as well be carbon-copied to its author.
What emerges unscathed is Solie’s fascination for the natural. Take her characterization of how “deer fold themselves / in elegant anxiety upon their grass couches” or “the caribou lichen // whose coral-like low forms, white against the mosses / and wild blueberry in its red phase, / seem to give off light”; foxes sniff at a toppled beech and beetles, like diminutive businessmen, carry metaphorical briefcases. Yet we lose a poem’s scent while its speaker pauses to exhaustively catalog the regional wildlife, minerals, and grasses (pace Carl Sandburg). Indeed, Solie is “through with fiction. / From now on, only fact.” Like the swamp surveyed in “Mash,” the going’s a slog when you’re knee-deep in nouns; but how beautiful is a newly blossomed apple, rotted by wildfire smoke, described as having “knelt down inside itself in its halo of bees.” (The collection’s most strident pastorals, according to the end notes, were commissioned for a collaborative work with the annoyingly earnest title of Project Earth.) Her aphorisms, on the other hand, tipping into simplicity, can sound like new-age affirmation (“Because if you decide something is enough, it’s enough,” “What you need to hear you must tell yourself”). Wellwater closes with wistful pictures — about the indifferent constellations, about fishing with one’s father — that beg comparison with better-known models: Auden’s “The More Loving One” and Schnackenberg’s “Nightfishing.” Arsenic from a cigarette rises in the December breeze and one picks up the meadowlark’s heathen song like radio. Nesting in tall cottonwoods — who, come spring, will “champagne the air” — owlets are threatened by road crews, and beneath the canopy’s thinning shade picnickers monitor the progress of hot dogs.