Review of Wellwater by Karen Solie
by Maddie Yates
How does life respond to a hostile world? In her newest collection of poetry, Wellwater, Karen Solie goes underground. An acclaimed Canadian poet from Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, her work blends rhetorical flourish and philosophy with the harsh perfection of the northern landscape. Solie’s recent poetry is a reversion: to childhood, to the subterranean, to the atomic.
Solie speaks apocalyptic knowledge from a basement shelter, but the tap root of her genius resists the imposition of man-made structure. She offers us a counter to consciousness and the stories we tell ourselves about the proceedings of life. Occasionally, a second voice surfaces in gentle italics, prodding a dialogue with our preconceptions. As Solie returns to the past, she asks us to question what facets of our knowledge still hold water in a modern age.
The stark natural landscapes of her poetry are aware of a lingering danger in pesticides and genetic modifiers. Brand names—“Luxxor™,” “Prosaro™, Folicular™”—are never more than an em dash away from a crucial food source, or a sacred deer (Red Spring). Cruel habitats can also be sites of vast clarity. Barren trees in a municipal park are logical as theorems (The Trees In Riverdale Park), and a pile of dirt fractures into a thousand perfect arguments (That Which Was Learned In Youth Is Always Most Familiar).
Be awed by the expansive voltas of Solie’s poetry. At times, Wellwater feels like a prophecy, but mentions of economic toil and anthropogenic destruction situate the collection firmly in the present day. Major themes of her collection include economic toil, anthropogenic destruction, and appropriation of indigenous lands. The Canadian territory so central to each poem turns on the modern individual and invades our boundaries of contemplation, philosophy, and rationality. It cannot be owned. Even the machine is a futile warhorse, taking shape in a careless snowplow (The Snowplow). We have tried to tame the revolutionary Tyger. But this effort always fails except to turn us into another cyborg, hands vibrating with the wheel.
Solie’s collection is full of desks for unsatisfying bureaucratic confrontation. At best, authorities offer blunt wisdoms like, “Whoever has no house now, will never have one.” (Autumn Day). Here comes fruitless bargaining in search of a home. We must at least desire “micro-suites, the bug-ridden/and the windowless”: costly Toronto apartments with all their puritanical charm (Toronto The Good). They are preferable to dire homelessness. It seems there is no escape from bodily need. So far from the “bee-loud glade” are the buzzing LEDs and industrial fans of a hospital (Possible Confounding Influences). Bleakly, we are unable to sustain and heal in these conditions. Solie prescribes a return to nature.
But Karen Solie wants a new kind of Romanticism. She shifts between frivolous beauty and precise, eerie imagery. Solie’s glade is livid. It points. The northern wilderness sees you, so reasoned, and informs you with a repulsed indifference. Solie’s Wellwater resists hailing enlightenment from nature. We should not mine for resources, life-force, or wisdom. Instead, knowledge is offered in darkness. It is radical to shun sight in an increasingly visual world. According to Solie, we ought to return to the most basic senses and to experience.
Edited by Annabella Lawlor and Ava Rukavina.