She Writes about Tractors and Oil Drilling. She’s Also Changing Canadian Poetry

Since the turn of the millennium, Karen Solie has been the coolest of cool new things in Canadian poetry—a mysterious figure, everywhere and nowhere at once. Everywhere because her books have received almost universal acclaim. And nowhere because, for all their hints of hard living and their undercurrent of despair, her poems divulge little of the author herself. But time happens to the best of us. Her first book, Short Haul Engine, was published in 2001—nearly a quarter century ago. Now Solie is pushing sixty, and I feel old. Born in 1966, Solie is roughly the same age as the Canadian poets Sue Goyette, Stephanie Bolster, and Ken Babstock. The late Steven Heighton (who died in 2022) was just slightly older. In our small country, these talented writers are esteemed by poetry insiders, their books amply praised and prized—and like with virtually every other Canadian poet, their reputations stop at the border. None of her peers approaches Solie in terms of international stature. With the possible exception of a handful of super luminaries—Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje—Solie has a higher profile than anyone in the game. By high, I mean stratospheric. Her Canadian publishers—Brick Books for her first volumes, and now Anansi—are well respected. But her US publisher is Farrar, Straus and Giroux, thank you very much, the erstwhile home of the celebrated American poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück. The Caiplie Caves—which largely focused on a medieval hermit named Ethernan—was a finalist for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Derek Walcott Prize: these are big-time poetry awards, which is to say they are not Canadian. (But she has won the $65,000 Griffin Prize, which is Canadian.) The acknowledgements page in her new book, Wellwater, is a murderers’ row of literary heavy hitters. Solie was a Guggenheim fellow. She even has an agent. As these credentials suggest, there is a widespread view, if not a consensus, that she is one of the major poets writing in English today. A decade ago, from the pulpit of London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann began an appraisal of Solie with a remarkably bold claim: Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: “It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.” Solie is Canadian . . . and, yes, she is the one by whom the language lives. That last iambic phrase is so extravagant that few subsequent reviews, and certainly not this one, can refrain from quoting it. Keeping the English language alive: nice work if you can get it.

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Wellwater is Solie’s seventh collection. And it is her best yet. She is still safely in mid-career, and it’s far too soon to say whether Wellwater marks a turning point or follows the trajectory set by her earlier works—from the “cucumber cool” world weariness of Short Haul Engine (hangovers, cigarettes, Anne Sexton), its hints of stand-up comedy, and search for origins to the intensified philosophical interests, more pronounced environmentalism, and wilder leaps of associative logic that come through in the later collections. Only the books to come will tell. Still, the poems in Wellwater suggest an increasing linguistic restraint and a deepening religious sensibility. They also offer glimpses of a somewhat less guarded poet—which is striking, given that Solie is, by contemporary standards, unusually private. Wellwater’s capsule biography is curt: “she teaches half-time for the University of St Andrews in Scotland and lives the rest of the year in Canada.” (That sounds a lot like another poet’s notoriously elliptical self-description: “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.”) Here’s what we know. Solie was born in Moose Jaw and, as an earlier bio note put it, “grew up on the family farm in south-west Saskatchewan.” Wellwater is dedicated to Howard Solie, the poet’s father, who died last year. The family was Catholic, which might explain everything: the attraction to mysticism, a casuistic bent, a sense of shame that haunts the poetry. After a stint as a local newspaper reporter, she studied English at the University of Lethbridge. There was a spell playing guitar and writing songs in a country outfit. Later, she attended the University of Victoria—and not, it’s worth noting, Yale or Stanford or the University of Iowa and its Writers’ Workshop. Solie abandoned academia, though if you were curious, you could dig up her MA thesis, which is buried in the UVic library. But there has always been something scholarly about her poetry: not fussy or pretentious but in love with ideas. Allusions to poets and thinkers appear with considerable frequency. The French mystic philosopher Simone Weil pops up in one passage of Solie’s Pigeon, “the endangered Banff snail” on the facing page. Solie published Short Haul Engine in her mid-thirties, not too early. Poems such as “Boyfriend’s Car”—“Black Nova. Jacked up. Fast”—suggest a retrospective tendency, a penchant for looking upon youthful experience with indulgence and detachment at once. The abrupt phrases here are shorthand for a not-altogether-happy dynamic—it’s the old story of the cost of knowledge acquired—that she recounts with the distance of the third-person pronoun and repurposed cliché: “She joined the club, / password muttered snidely / by tattletale skin.” Her days on the West Coast are evoked in Short Haul Engine and her follow-up, Modern and Normal. But by the time of that second collection, she was living in Toronto. The west, however, remained a preoccupation, although hers is the west of tractors, derricks, and subdivisions, not Gore-Tex and lift tickets. It goes without saying that great poets must be whizzes with language, but they also need something consequential to write about: style is everything, except when it’s not. And Solie has made hay out of the lowest-common-denominator landscapes of western Canada, the ennui and restlessness of late-capitalist life, and the sublime technological innovations that tower over their creators—“the Buhler Versatile 2360,” for instance, a tractor “More than a storey high and twice that long.” She renovated the CanLit stereotype of prairie pastoral for the twenty-first century, showing that what happens almost invisibly in the middle provinces—agribusiness, oil extraction, boom-bust economies—defines our way of life. This unclouded vantage is maintained in Wellwater, where Solie’s view of the prairies is less nostalgic than herbicidal: “Luxxur™ for problematic grass weeds,” “Buctril M™,” “Infinity FX™.” “[W]e were not native to that place,” she laments in the title poem, “our glyphosate on the wind, our malathion.” She mentioned Diazinon in Short Haul Engine, but here the chemical lexicon is relentless. In “Red Spring,” she is even more blunt: “I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful.” But she does, in a way. Hofmann was not wrong. But neither was he perfectly right. For if Solie is “the one by whom the language lives,” she is also a poet in whose hands the language—artfully—dies. She is incomparably attuned to the linguistic drabness that, like beige paint, surrounds us. Such flatness has become, in turn, a hallmark of her poetry; a colloquial ungainliness is part of her style. Solie is unafraid to end sentences, and even poems, with prepositions; to lean on the passive voice, phatic expressions, the impersonal pronoun “one,” and copula verbs; even to use breathtakingly ugly phrases. (The indefensible “as has been written” appears in “Caribou.”) At other times, her writing is simply breathtaking, as in these lines from “Foxes”: the grass flattened under the book of water Storm Dennis threw at England Her poetry depends on the friction between clumsiness and the musicality to which she otherwise inclines. She is not the only poet to use a deadpan vernacular; nor is she the first to clink a low register against the high (ice cubes in a glass). What distinguishes her poetry is the skill with which she deploys her technique, the intelligence behind her offhand observations, and her commitment to hesitation, qualification, and doubt. She is incomparably precise, knowing just how long to let a poem go slack before pulling the line taut. Clearly, she is playing her own game, making up rules as she goes. And the stakes are high. When she alludes in one poem to W. B. Yeats—“my own bee-loud glade” nods to the “bee-loud glade” in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”—the impression is not that she is farting higher than her ass but rather that she is drawing on a wellspring of language that she has every right to use. Everything is fair game for her patchwork poetry. Her range extends from the demotic to the sacred, her poems rarely betraying the strain of reaching for the upper notes. The same holds for her biblical quotations. Echoes of Proverbs are as engrained in her writing as everyday speech and the names of agricultural chemicals. Her diction is religious: anointed, oil, worship, souls, cathedral. “Basement Suite” borrows from Ecclesiastes (“to every purpose under heaven”), and “Dust,” which begins with the family “Returning home from evening mass,” alludes to the Sermon on the Mount. In “Parables of the Rat,” Solie lifts a phrase from the Gospel of Matthew. The first lines of “Meadlowlark” refer to birdsong, but they likewise describe the poet’s own music: “Prayer in the throat of a nonbeliever / offered up to the absent hereafter.” Book titles tend to announce central themes and recurring metaphors, but Solie’s are often opaque; Pigeon doesn’t give readers much to go on. As a title, Wellwater intrigues. It suggests, of course, water from the ground, and in our age of ecological anxiety, it is impossible not to wonder if that water is safe to drink. The well also suggests a dip into the underworld with all its attendant myths and psychological implications. The first poem in Wellwater is “Basement Suite,” that second word having a musical as well as an architectural meaning. “It’s not the underworld for Christ’s sake,” the speaker says of the below-ground apartment—but she doth protest too much. The poem “Wellwater” is about an actual well. There are “overgrown wells” in “On Faith.” And so on, as if the caves in The Caiplie Caves weren’t dark and dismal enough. In “Holiday at the Wave Pool,” Solie describes a “water feature” at the mall—or perhaps the mall itself, or the condition of being in the mall—as “Pretty decent. It could be worse.” This isn’t quite philosophy, but it captures something of her world view. Solie’s poems examine the unhappinesses of modern and normal life—economic inequality, corporate rapaciousness, shitty landlords—but equally allow the comforts of this benighted realm, among them delights scorned by those who can afford, and who have learned to covet, “a nine-dollar loaf of artisan organic ancient grain sourdough.” Solie concludes “Holiday at the Wave Pool” with a remembered dinner with dad at McDonald’s: “And my god, it was glorious.” In context, that ubiquitous bit of emphasis takes on a prayerful cast, as if the speaker were telling the man upstairs about the Golden Arches. Yet Solie is less a champion of the lowbrow than an observer, even when she makes a devastating comparison of a simulation to the real thing: “A water feature beneath potted trees . . . is a place to enjoy without buying, like nature.” As with the artisanal loaf, here she skewers taste and aspiration. Water features in malls are tacky; nature is not, especially if going outside necessitates the purchase of a thousand-dollar Arc’teryx rain jacket. Poets have been writing about class for a long time. There is plenty of poverty in the works of Alden Nowlan, Al Purdy, Patrick Lane, and John Newlove, to name some CanLit heavies, and many Canadian poets have chronicled labour: Peter Trower (logging), Kate Braid (construction), Joe Denham (commercial fishing), and so on. What sets Solie apart is not simply a preoccupation with the cost of living but a cool openness to all forms of experience—her acceptance of the possibility that, as the American poet Katherine Larson once wrote, “Either everything’s sublime or nothing is.” My favourite poem in Wellwater is “That Which Was Learned in Youth Is Always Most Familiar.” It’s about her five-year-old nephew, who teaches a philosophical lesson despite the speaker’s professed distaste for the notion that children are stores of wisdom. It’s a safe bet that Psalm 8—“Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings . . . ”—wasn’t far from mind. Solie often writes about childhood but rarely about children, and the unanticipated subject is part of the poem’s charm. The poem itself has lessons to teach, and there is a possible allusion to the Book of Job to puzzle over, but at heart, it is a self-deprecating account of “Auntie” Karen, who reports that she “would sooner be right than happy,” which is a terrible and revealing pronouncement. Funny, too, for it implies that her instinct is to debate a small child. “That Which Was Learned” is more straightforward than much of Solie’s poetry, and seemingly more personal. Often I am dazzled by her poems; this one moves me. It gives a peek at what she might do in the future. Wellwater is full of small revelations. At this point, Solie has little left to achieve, but if her poems keep letting their mask slip, they might genuinely surprise us. She has been a thrillingly unpredictable poet for twenty-five years. Who knows? She might just start telling it straight.The post She Writes about Tractors and Oil Drilling. She’s Also Changing Canadian Poetry first appeared on The Walrus.