It is human nature to want our landscapes neatly framed – partitions and picket fences create the phantasm that the good outdoor might be managed and contained. But Karen Solie’s wildly unpredictable assortment Wellwater flips the script. On this blazingly sincere catalogue of human-made hazard and hurt, we rejoice as an alternative the modern landscapes refusing to be tamed.
Solie, who teaches on the College of St Andrews in Scotland, was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in western Canada, the place huge prairies provide a lot of the world’s pulse crops. This fertile expanse in Wellwater, nonetheless, appears uninterested in countless service. The poem Purple Spring witnesses how “weeds bounce up unbidden, every year just a little smarter”. They’re making an attempt, nearly courageously, to outwit what Solie condemns as “zombie know-how”, whose genetically modified “terminator seeds” sprout terrifying vegetation which can be “extra lifeless than alive”.
There may be some flicker of peace in much less apocalyptic pastoral scenes, as when the “white-tailed fawns sleep inside wild chokecherry/in hollowed-out rooms” and drought-soothing rain falls like confetti from “the mansions of the skies”. However for a lot of this poetry, as in Pines, the panorama writhes “in misery”. The pages reek of fungicide and glyphosate, a weedkiller that’s linked poignantly by the poet to a case of non-Hodgkin lymphoma: “ask the crew boss who cleared the nozzle of my sprayer/by blowing via it,” Solie insists, “they will’t return.”
This stunning correlation, examined squarely, evokes a refreshing honesty because the poet acknowledges her personal flaws: “I don’t know the way to make this lovely”, she confesses. “Can we return? Meet one another within the previous information?” If solely we may, is the tragically bitter aftertaste of those poems – a candy life on the prairie with braids, bonnets and wonder couldn’t be extra distant if Solie tried.
In Dangerous Panorama and the trembling aftershock of fracking and radiation, every phrase hangs thrillingly from a “low hum of menace”. Any final echo of picturesque expectations splinters with the post-industrial horror – it spills out with the oil and the ocean’s treasure chest of poisonous waste.
It’s not simply “unhealthy landscapes” that burst violently into view. Solie additionally eats “unhealthy sandwiches” in unhealthy flats. The worst of those hellish boltholes are the “windowless and the bug-ridden”, that are spectacularly reimagined in Toronto the Good as “tiny museums of illegality”. It’s right here the place the true gem of Wellwater sparkles into sight, reinforcing a placing foundational premise: we’re all unhealthy landlords of the planet we name dwelling. Or relatively, collectively, we’re as an alternative unhealthy tenants, as her condemnation of “greed and neglect” encourages us to extra humbly concede.
In Basement Suite the picture of childhood as a room with barred home windows is fascinating, as are the doorways between dimensions that creak open in Antelope. Often, you would like Solie would linger a second longer, lifting the latch to totally allow us to in. Some concepts stay tantalisingly locked, however her flourishing creativeness in The Bushes in Riverdale Park stuns – our vegetal cousins by some means “thrive like understandings”. So whereas a few of these gems really feel uncut, their meant meanings left unresolved, the uncooked candour of her reflections leaves us captivated nonetheless.
There may be stunning depth, too – profound observations in Orion clarify how the “lifeless might be kinder/than the residing,/in case you are not associated to them”, and in The Bluebird how “Good and unhealthy don’t all the time line up reverse”. What does line up clearly, nonetheless, is the vanity and the content material, framing Wellwater within the picture of its intriguing namesake – darkish and deep, rippling secrets and techniques and shock.
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