Latest news with #Wellwater
The Guardian
22-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Wellwater by Karen Solie – landscapes in distress captured with raw candour
It is human nature to prefer our landscapes neatly framed – walls and wooden fences create the illusion that the great outdoors can be controlled and contained. Yet Karen Solie's wildly unpredictable collection Wellwater flips the script. In this blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm, we celebrate instead the contemporary landscapes refusing to be tamed. Solie, who teaches at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in western Canada, where vast prairies supply much of the world's pulse crops. This fertile expanse in Wellwater, however, seems tired of endless service. The poem Red Spring witnesses how 'weeds jump up unbidden, each year a little smarter'. They are trying, almost courageously, to outwit what Solie condemns as 'zombie technology', whose genetically modified 'terminator seeds' sprout terrifying plants that are 'more dead than alive'. There is some flicker of peace in 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'. But for much of this poetry, as in Pines, the landscape writhes 'in distress'. The pages reek of fungicide and glyphosate, a weedkiller that is 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 through it,' Solie insists, 'they can't go back.' This shocking correlation, examined squarely, inspires a refreshing honesty as the poet acknowledges her own flaws: 'I don't know how to make this beautiful', she confesses. 'Can we go back? Meet each other in the old knowledge?' If only we could, is the tragically bitter aftertaste of these poems – a sweet life on the prairie with braids, bonnets and beauty could not be more distant if Solie tried. In Bad Landscape and the trembling aftershock of fracking and radiation, each word hangs thrillingly from a 'low hum of menace'. Any last echo of picturesque expectations splinters with the post-industrial horror – it spills out with the oil and the sea's treasure chest of toxic waste. It's not just 'bad landscapes' that burst violently into view. Solie also eats 'bad sandwiches' in bad flats. The worst of these hellish boltholes are the 'windowless and the bug-ridden', which are spectacularly reimagined in Toronto the Good as 'tiny museums of illegality'. It is here where the real gem of Wellwater sparkles into sight, reinforcing a striking foundational premise: we are all bad landlords of the planet we call home. Or rather, collectively, we are instead bad tenants, as her condemnation of 'greed and neglect' encourages us to more humbly concede. In Basement Suite the image of childhood as a room with barred windows is fascinating, as are the doors between dimensions that creak open in Antelope. Occasionally, you wish Solie would linger a moment longer, lifting the latch to fully let us in. Some ideas remain tantalisingly locked, but her flourishing imagination in The Trees in Riverdale Park stuns – our vegetal cousins somehow 'thrive like understandings'. So while some of these gems feel uncut, their intended meanings left unresolved, the raw candour of her reflections leaves us captivated nonetheless. There is surprising depth, too – profound observations in Orion explain how the 'dead can be kinder/than the living,/if you are not related to them', and in The Bluebird how 'Good and bad don't always line up opposite'. What does line up clearly, however, is the conceit and the content, framing Wellwater in the image of its intriguing namesake – dark and deep, rippling secrets and surprise. Wellwater by Karen Solie is published by Picador (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
CBC
08-04-2025
- CBC
Wellwater by Karen Solie
The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solie's sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural, economic, and personal ideas of "value," addressing housing, economic and environmental crisis, and aging and its incumbent losses. In an era of accelerating inequality, places many of us thought of as home have become unaffordable. In "Basement Suite," the faux-utopian economy of Airbnb suggests people with property "share" it with us and, presumably, we should be grateful. In "Parables of the Rat" the speaker feels affinity with scavengers while also wanting the rats gone. Having grown up in Saskatchewan on a small family farm, Solie sees the economic and environmental crises as inseparable. Climate change has made small farming increasingly untenable, allowing overbearing corporate control of food production. But hope, Solie argues, is as necessary to addressing the crises of our time as bearing witness, in poems that celebrate wonder and persistence in the non-human world. Tamarack forests in Newfoundland that grow inches over hundreds of years, the suddenly thriving pronghorn antelope, or a new, unidentified and ineradicable climbing vine, all hint at renewal, and a way to move forward. (From House of Anansi Press) Wellwater is available in April 2025. Karen Solie is the author of several poetry collections, including Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out and The Caiplie Caves. She has received many awards, such as the Trillium Poetry Prize and the Griffin Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She teaches half-time in Scotland at the University of St. Andrews and spends the remainder of the year in Canada.
