Wellwater

In Karen Solie’s poetry, contamination is both a thematic and formal principle. Her poems mix colloquial, standard, and technical speech elements, brand names and found material, the language of a farm and the corporation, and philosophical reflections with arch generalizations. The strength of Solie’s poetry lies in her capacity to shift between these registers, linking them to the fractured condition of the present with both directness and humor. Wellwater, her sixth collection, develops this approach further. 

The sense of continuity of purpose is suggested by the collection’s title poem which begins: “I didn’t know what I had.” Its memory of water collecting is one live with contaminants: of skin “anointed with baby oil,” of non-native trees, of gravel dust and “glyphosate on the wind.” The final line answers the loss alluded to in the opening: “The water then, you could still drink it.” As often in a Solie poem, the language of chemicals works to undermine any separation of the human plight from that of the environment. Molecular chemistry binds us all and the political impetus of this shared fate is evident throughout the book, though any naïve “return to nature” is rightly shown to be a fantasy:

Such wide confusion fills the countryside,
it’s said you can’t go back. Unless you’re rich enough
to farm years at a loss, you can’t…

Solie’s rural spaces are sites of ruthless extraction, riven by the corporate machinery of “feedlots, gas wells, sweatshops, coal mines.” The fragile borders of landscape, from her childhood home in Moose Jaw Saskatchewan to those in Toronto, mirror those between natural and human. Simple dichotomies—rural and urban, mind and body—are eschewed. Rather, the natural and historical, rational and creaturely, are in an ongoing negotiation throughout the book. Animals and plants which feature are often those that have been forced to adapt to human presence. There are mourning doves that “rattle and creak like / prototypes,” or else are seen “squatting on the eaves like taxidermy / stuffed with personal tragedy / and singing —.” In Wellwater, forms of housing or shelter are similarly makeshift and precarious: hotels, basements, and developments plagued by landlords. Structurally, the poems reflect the individuals that inhabit these spaces. They are temporary meeting places for multiple flows of language, fragile but stubborn accruals of biological, psychological, economic, and toxic forces. This deeper fabric of mutual contamination which animates the vital sense of loss is the emotive bedrock of Wellwater. 

The connection between landscape and memory is equally central to this sensibility, something Solie herself diagnoses when she writes: “it’s one of the indecencies of age / that landscape takes on this commemorative aspect.” Elsewhere, in the poem “Bad Landscape,” space and meaning deliberately fail to cohere in a way that speaks directly to our time. This
“sketched-out town” and “a structure neither representational / nor abstract” becomes the site of one of the poetic-philosophical turns Solie excels at:

………………………………………………There isn’t any sense
of an origin, of what Plato called the lower soul,
to animate what’s lacking with the spark of its remainder.

The summary of the Platonic idea, at once arresting and beautiful, might serve equally as a poetic credo.

Stylistically, the poems achieve their balance through directness and clarity matched by adept sonic shifts, particularly assonantal. Handling of vowel pattern is a key element in the texture of Solie’s language, a kind of thickening agent in lines like: “They cool their feet / in the pool of their own shade.”. Consequently, Solie is at her best when wryness is pressured by the friction of concision. The small number of poems which don’t quite succeed are those where the reflective voice holds sway entirely, lapsing into a narrative mode where a lack of friction in the language makes any tensions in the experience seem pre-emptively resolved.

For the most part, Wellwater matches ambition with subtlety, in which psychological and philosophical enquiries as well as environmental and anthropological concerns contest and co-constitute one another. “Canopy,” the final poem in the collection and one of its high notes, is a perfect example. Its two cottonwood trees, clinging to their “shallow stony ditches”, become figures of endurance, capturing and shutting out time:

It was the same, Dad said,
when he was a child, owlets
in their canopy beds, time eddying
deep in the shelter of the cottonwoods
where demands of the yard and fields
couldn’t enter…

The poem ends with an image at once descriptively apt and deeply human. Even as: “heavy equipment passes / beneath them more often now” they hold on “in excess / of their average lifespan / and function” to “champagne the air with cotton.” Resistance and celebration are made in the face of overwhelming odds.

Ultimately, Wellwater sees Solie using the techniques honed in her earlier work to their full potential. If some of the territory seems familiar, it is largely because Solie has made it entirely her own.