May 2006
Feature show/hide
John Glenday introducing Karen Solie
I met Karen Solie and heard her read, and was impressed when I returned to Edmonton for a reunion of Writers in Residence in March 2006. She read in one of the newer buildings of the University – one wall a curve of windows and steady snow falling outside. There was a hush both sides of the glass. She read well. Afterwards I bought her pamphlet The Shooter’s Bible and discovered that her poems sound as good on the page as they read in the air, that they had weight as well as music. I went straight back and bought Modern and Normal, her latest collection.
Two poems caught my attention that first day: ‘An Argument for Small Arms’, in which Solie subtly conflates details of gunmanship and desire and ‘The Birds of British Columbia’ a gem of a ‘found’ poem which I kept pondering and rereading for the rest of my stay in Canada.
I met Karen Solie and heard her read, and was impressed when I returned to Edmonton for a reunion of Writers in Residence in March 2006. She read in one of the newer buildings of the University – one wall a curve of windows and steady snow falling outside.
There was a hush both sides of the glass. She read well. Afterwards I bought her pamphlet ‘The Shooter’s Bible’ and discovered that her poems sound as good on the page as they read in the air, that they had weight as well as music. I went straight back and bought Modern and Normal, her latest collection.
Two poems caught my attention that first day: ‘An Argument for Small Arms’, in which Solie subtly conflates details of gunmanship and desire, and ‘The Birds of British Columbia’, a gem of a ‘found’ poem which I kept pondering and rereading for the rest of my stay in Canada.
I like the way she takes risks with her poems – the way she includes ‘The Birds of British Columbia’ and another six found poems in Modern and Normal, and it works:
‘Describe the family of curves. Find the common eccentricity,
when the loci exist. Describe the family and find
the common eccentricity. Describe the family.
Show that the members of the family are pairs
of parallel lines. Show that a term cannot be introduced
into the equation by the rotation of axes.’
(from 'Invariants')
And it works, of course, because it works on different levels, with everything turning on the double meaning of ‘axes’.
I like the way her poetry can be hopelessly learned, but doesn’t shut us out: for example, mixing Xavier de Maistre’s bizarre Journey around my Bedroom, Simone Weil, an old man with his Boston Terrier and Blaise Pascal all in one poem; a poem which kicks off with Heidegger’s Abyss and ends in Baudrillard’s America ('The Apartments'). I like the way she details the inhumanities that make us human, then counts herself in with the rest of humanity:
‘An indigenous squirrel regards me squarely
from a branch. Cougars are culling local pets,
elk calve with murder in their eyes, and it’s the worst
tick season in 40 years. The whole valley
is out for blood, for itself. As, of course, am I.’
(from 'Pastoral')
Her closeness to nature is obvious, but this is farm-nature; it’s nature in the raw - there isn’t a micron of sentimentality in there. Most of all, though, I like her poems because they are beautiful and say something to me that needs said.
Xavier de Maistre described the room around which he journeyed as ‘that enchanted realm containing all the wealth and riches of the world’. Meaning, of course, the world of the imagination. Karen Solie’s poems are certainly imaginative, they are bright and rich and dark and full of weathers, each one a little world closed in a little room. Step inside.
John Glenday was born in 1952 and currently works as an addictions counsellor with NHS Highland. He is the author of two collections: The Apple Ghost (Peterloo Poets 1989) which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; and Undark (Peterloo Poets 1995) which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Poems have been anthologised in the Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry (Faber and Faber 1992); The Firebox (Picador 1998); and New British Poetry (Grey Wolf Press 2004). He was appointed Scottish/Canadian Exchange Fellow for 1990/91, based at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.
Poem show/hide
Karen Solie
The Birds of British Columbia
From The Birds of British Columbia (4) Upland Game Birds.
Victoria British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1971
In no other game bird but the ruffled grouse do the tones
of gray, black, cinnamon and white shade and blend
with such quiet harmony. Child of the wilderness
that he is, in the full dark pupil of that eye surrounded
by an iris of October’s own brown, seem always to dwell
the brooding shadows of the great forest he loves
so well. And in the moulding of him Nature seems
to have embodied all the beauty, all the charm, all
the inexplicable strangeness and romance of the autumnal
woods and produced her feathered masterpiece. Always
is he the woodland’s pride, alert, instinct with life, and filled
with a spirit and a dash that furnishes, in such mixed cover
as we were hunting this day, the very climax
of shooting with the shotgun.
from Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), reproduced with permission of Brick Books
Gophers
Dirt divers, you pop up, fast and fleshy weeds. We turn
our ankles where you’ve been and bust your heads
for fun. In the lab of summertime we experiment the finer points
of poison, snares, gasoline, twist your tails off at the root,
then finally, old enough, use that Christmas .22 gifted
lovingly oiled, with a big red bow. You eat and breed. We try
to drown you out. You’re thieves, and we can’t spare a thing.
In winter, as you coma deep inside your rancid holes,
we satisfy ourselves chasing rabbits with Ski-doos
until spring when hungry coyotes raid the coops and we need
to shoot them too. They kill the fawns, reserved
for city hunters who pay cash to anyone who’ll take them
through the fields. Each season has its cruelties. It’s for the best.
Is nature not more callous than the gun? First and precious
taste of blood, there’s always more where you come from.
from Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), reproduced with permission of Brick Books
Under the Sun
Rain is the merging of cool air with warm
under general conditions of humidity. Try to remember
it has nothing to do with love
or grief. This is the consolation of philosophy:
it’s out of our hands. The business of bars
and stores, our separate beds, the garbaged
offices of alleyways, is aging. It sighs
in the blood like salt, slows us, and is why
our hearts are heaviest on the moment
of waking: the weight we ferry, the fright,
the long vowel opening at the centre
of a consonant world that draws the hurt up,
an empty bowl, while history’s rebar is replaced
and a species coughs its lungs out
in another room. Private lives of insects
and the single notes that move them, hard-won
courage of raccoon and crow who eat our garbage
and hate us, are foreclosed. We are lonely. We
are here. Inside a vestigial swimmer bears
memory like the phantom pain of when the earth
was new and we were a promise in the sex
of its making, its heat and pools. Cells’ random
liquid birth. In the molecular ache of land
as it cooled, when, before tears, before
property, it rained for more than a million years.
from Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), reproduced with permission of Brick Books
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1966 and grew up on the family farm in the southwest of the province. She has lived in Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, Austin, Texas, Victoria, Edmonton, and currently Toronto. She has worked as a daily newspaper reporter/photographer, a groundskeeper, a barista in a mall food court a library assistant, played in alt country bands and taught English at the University of Victoria. Karen was on the poetry faculty for the 2005-2006 Banff Centre for the Arts Wired Writing Studio and served as Writer in Residence at the University of Alberta for 2004-2005. She has reviewed books for the Globe and Mail since 2001.
Her first book of poems, Short Haul Engine (Brick Books 2001), won the BC Book Prize Dorothy Livesay Award, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Gerald Lampert Award, and the ReLit Prize. Her second, Modern and Normal (Brick Books 2005), was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Prize.
Publications by Karen Solie show/hide
Short Haul Engine Brick Books, 2001
Modern and Normal Brick Books, 2005
Comments show/hide