on Karen Solie

Mourning Doves

Karen Solie’s latest poetry collection, Wellwater, is full of unheralded life forms that survive even our grisliest eradication attempts: ‘foxtail, cleavers, sow thistle, kochia’. ‘The Climbing Vine’, one of the most striking poems in the collection, tells of a creeping plant that emerges suddenly and, troublingly, will not go away: ‘arm over arm in its wet clothes’, the vine ‘hauled itself to the second-floor balcony’ and ‘spread out’. In an interview with the LARB, Solie spoke of her preferred formal structures (‘stanzas of regular lengths, sonnet-like poems’), confessing: ‘I have a real need for symmetry’. But ‘The Climbing Vine’ is not left-justified, and there are bits of text scattered across the page like plant cuttings borne by the wind. While this works to slow the line, the creeping plant stubbornly advances. Had it been permitted its monstrous growth, the vine, with all the gumption of Milton’s Satan – ‘[w]ould have torn the house down and stood on the ruin / tossing its hook at the downspout of Heaven’. You can’t help but cheer for it.

Several poems in Wellwater are like this: they look to disquieting, compromised forms of life for lessons about how to persist in a time of climactic ruin. I hesitate to use this word, ‘lessons’, because Solie is not a moralising poet. Neither are her poems’ conclusions about how to live very clear, and certainly not very instructive. Instead, they are full of beclouded vision: fog, mist, wildfire smoke, freezing rain, dust. At times, too, the syntax twists itself into unfamiliar terrain ...