In a Karen Solie poem, distance will be covered: on foot, in used cars or on public transit, by train or bus. To dignify these distances covered as travel is to overreach, to suggest a conclusion about the significance of where these trips start and stop. If there is property, it’s a rental, a motel, or the outdoors. The views from windows and from natural features that invite reflection are of places humans have done things to and continue, inexorably, to alter. No hiding the damage and no apology for it either. While some spaces remain wilder than others, “the wild” barely exists in this North America. Ownership is for corporations, the city, or the state. Expectations are low, and kept so; if high, they are misplaced. The people, things, and relationships in Solie’s poems are not built to last, at least not on her home ground in Canada. The engine in the title of her first book is a provincial or provisional mechanism, a Short Haul Engine (2001).
Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Solie is accustomed to wide-open spaces, to long stretches of not much but weather and raptors between small towns called destinations only in brochures published by the local Chambers of Commerce. “Via,” from The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out (2015), is a journey through space I characterize ambivalently as liminal, a train journey between towns that seem to have no center and are endless outskirts, pure exurbs: “Everywhere, / motives on display, arguments with the ideal, / though it makes no sense to say we’ve always / played this wrong. One doubt hides another.” At this moment late in the poem, her characteristic compassionate accuracy refuses despair. The climax comes earlier, when
A passing freight
throws a bag over your head, pushes your thoughts over,
roars and clatters at a forearm’s distance like the exposed
mechanics of a parallel universe and for a moment
you belong to the ages, without affiliation.
This parallel universe might be an eruption of despair or, worse yet, an unmediated view of the capital markets producing the demand for and the excess stuff that survives as junk beside the tracks. As day breaks, even night is “remaindered.”
Consider “The World,” an unusual Solie poem about a singular cruise ship, from the same collection. Owned by its “community of residents,” it travels constantly around the globe. “The World” opens: “When I learned I could own a piece of The World / I got my chequebook out. Eternal life belongs to those / who live in the present.” The aphoristic claim about “Eternal life” could have been lifted from a Buddhist text—or from an ad for luxury retail therapy. Solie is not the first poet to recognize the similarity between the tone of spiritual texts in translation and the blandishments of luxury goods, and the uses luxury brands make of the former. Late capitalism has an insatiable appetite for the poetry that celebrates it as for the poetry that condemns, critiques, or laments it. Disgust at the excess, laughter at the pieties, or admiration for the sheer chutzpah at the prospect of owning any of “The World” might prevent us from appreciating her tone. With a little help from Wittgenstein, Solie considers our situation and our predicament—it’s always both—with an even tone. The mystery for Solie is simple and enduring: why are things not different?
A careful reader of philosophy who doesn’t write it, Solie deploys reason in her poems as a force like any other, to be put to any use. “Dog Star,” from her Griffin Prize–winning third collection, Pigeon (2009), records a drive home in the dog days, possibly for the funeral of the unnamed neighbor whose capsule obituary takes up most of—and concludes—the first stanza.
Having left the husband
who for twenty years had beaten her,
having found a job and a lover,
our neighbour has died, misdiagnosed,
at 50. There is luck, and then there is luck,
and if there is any other lesson here
I will never get used to it.
This kind of luck, which Solie tactfully refuses to call bad or hard, is indistinguishable from fate; to paraphrase Janis Joplin, this kind of luck is just another word for nothing left to lose. As in so many Solie poems, in “Dog Star” what’s absent is any expectation that things could be otherwise. The poem’s concluding lines explain why this lesson remains unlearned and why it remains impossible to domesticate loss or come to terms with a world where so many come to grief.
Because once again the part of the mind
called the heart appears on the threshold,
swinging its amnesias before it like a lantern.
Claiming the heart is not just subservient to but a part of the mind is to be almost too explicit about temperament, to almost militate against what that swinging lantern might signal—and signify—at the end of a more conventional poem. To make amnesia plural is to admit one of the defining characteristics of realism into the ill-starred “Dog Star.” Credible realist fiction creates an account of what is that’s so absorbing, the reader doesn’t notice or immediately care about what’s absent or left out. In Solie’s poems, the absences that aren’t immediately perceived as essential loom, determinative, amoral forces like “all the great anvils thundering and sparking / along the tornado corridor west of Swift Current / in regional splendor.” Solie’s realism can be clinical at times, disappointed but dispassionate. A master of the sardonic sublime, she can sometimes be too explicit, tyrannized by tiny differences, her tone laconic or merely acerbic.
Like Elizabeth Bishop, a poet she does not appear to have much in common with at first glance except their roots in Canada, Solie is dedicated to accuracy. What Eleanor Cook writes about Bishop could be praise for Solie too: “I came to realize that one test for some of Bishop’s lines or phrases is whether simple accuracy accounts for them. Sometimes there is not the slightest need to assume whimsy or fantasy or imaginary worlds.” For the same reason Cook’s adjective “simple” can be read as faint praise, dismissive of accuracy and thus of Bishop’s accomplishment, so it is easy to miss what makes Solie exceptional. In an otherwise antic, hyperbolic piece about her, Michael Hofmann puts his finger on it: “one of the great things about Solie: so much is primary, hasn’t been written about before, pays no dues, does without obeisances or retreading or sheepishness.”
Solie’s second collection, Modern and Normal (2005), contains several found poems. They cull sources as diverse as Solie’s actual job performance reviews, a “Bomb Threat Checklist,” and a textbook of “Elementary Calculus.” It is initially surprising to find poems from sources this diverse sounding so alike, ironic to the point of obliterating the distinction between any meaning and its opposite. This obliteration is the sought-after effect, a product of the poems’ essential realism. Solie’s Modern and Normal might be read as a casebook. The poems’ speakers cannot tell their own stories because there is too little that is human in the words available for them to speak. Unfortunately, everybody is a statistic yet no one wants to be one. To consider Freud’s theory of regression as a theory of regression to the mean is a bad pun because algorithms are no laughing matter. Solie and her personae try to account for what life is like in this you-break-it-you-buy-it world.
If to damage any thing is to raise a question about its value, then why is it so easy, almost a reflex, to throw damaged goods away while goods damaged before we lived are priceless? In “Cave Bear,” Solie meditates on the eon, the nothing that, to the market, is really something:
The longer dead, the more expensive.
Extinction adds value.
Value appreciates.
This may demonstrate a complex cultural mechanism
but in any case, buyers get interested.
And nothing’s worth anything without the buyers.
No one knows that better
than the United Mine Workers of America.
“Value appreciates.” As simple as a sentence can be that is both a statement of fact and a vivid personification. Even in death, this creature cannot escape becoming capitalism’s prey.
A hired team catalogued the skeleton,
took it from its cave to put on the open market.
Retail bought it, flew it over to reassemble
and sell again. Imagine him
foraging low Croatian mountains in the Pleistocene
and now he’s flying. Now propped at an aggressive posture
in the foyer of a tourist shop in the Canadian Rockies
and going for roughly forty.
The creature’s afterlife, preposterous but mockingly present to us as flight, is manifest in the desires of the buyers, and is available in a way that its life never can be. The “Value” extinction adds is more real than this creature’s life, as if entire species and periods (like the Pleistocene) should take to heart the quip that for an artist, death is a good career move. Just go on and die already.
“Cave Bear” becomes an elegy for the kind of people for whom death is routine, violent, and, because it’s just the cost of doing business, it does not add value.
The pit extends its undivided attention.
When the gas ignited off the slant at Hillcrest
Old Level One, 93 years ago
June, they were carried out by the hundreds,
alive or dead, the bratticemen, carpenters,
timbermen, rope-riders, hoistmen,
labourers, miners, all but me, Sidney Bainbridge,
the one man never found.
Suddenly it becomes possible to hear the poem as spoken by Sidney Bainbridge who, more than a figure of speech, is a wronged person in his own right. Value, Extinction, and Retail are personified but never dramatically, their capitalization coincident with the beginning of the sentences in which they assert overwhelming agency. Until the final stanza, these impersonal forces have a monopoly on agency (the sentences in which Extinction and Value make their claims don’t have subjects). In the first stanza the United Mine Workers look like villains, complicit in the nifty—or is it thrifty?—feat of transmogrifying extinction into capital. But by the end the union is just another instrument: the lives of so many lost, not even collateral damage but waste- or by-products of extractive capitalism.
When I perused the online memorial to the victims of the Hillcrest Mine Disaster, the worst ever in Canada, I gained a new appreciation for “Cave Bear,” and for the amnesiac language of capital. Every miner has a webpage, with scant or no biographical information; other than their bodies they left few traces. The site notes where each is buried. Sidney Bainbridge is listed as “buried in the mine.” One wonders what kind of irony this is, or if it is ironic at all. The bottom line is bottomless, and only a mining company might think it an honor to be buried in one’s place of employment—coincidentally underground, the tribute conveniently eliding the fact that Bainbridge was quite possibly buried alive.
Solie’s latest book, The Caiplie Caves (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020), is the first to spend most of its time outside of North America and the first to include a preface to explain its subject. “Acknowledged as a site of pilgrimage from antiquity, the Caiplie Caves, on the coast of Scotland’s East Neuk of Fife, are most consistently associated with the hermit Ethernan.” If a saint is an unlikely subject for Solie, Ethernan is an unusual saint: “Inconsistencies [in the chronicles] are not surprising. What is surprising is Ethernan’s poverty of supernatural accomplishments.” After a brief list of typical miracles, she remarks drily: “Ethernan, meanwhile, is said to have survived for a very long time on bread and water.” Except the choice of food one starves on, for too many progress is on hold, eternally delayed. By Solie’s reckoning, Ethernan, “likely derived from the Latin ‘aeternus,’ or ‘eternal,’” is a kind of Everyman.
Leaving the world, Ethernan cannot escape distractions. And how little has changed about what one gets up to while getting away from it all. “People still build fires in the caves at Caiplie, drink, and camp there. Alongside crosses carved over centuries, they record their own symbols and advice, political statements, declarations of uncertainty and love.” Graffiti, defacement, has always been used to mark physical boundaries, to affirm the reality of feelings in an unfeeling world, and as a means to try to express what the authorities frown on, root out, suppress. “Extinction adds value” indeed. The sign of the cross carved in the rock might be considered priceless because of its durability as a symbol. Yet the power resides in the gesture; it is portable, requires only stone tools, and can make any temporary impulse permanent.
The Caiplie Caves is a long collection, over a hundred pages, and about a third of the poems are right-justified to distinguish the voice of the saint from contemporary voices. That the saint often sounds almost indistinguishable from the voices sounding the depths of contemporary anomie could be considered a failure of imagination, though I do not think it is. There are mistakes of tone: “Jesus is love, but bank the coals or die,” sounds too much like the line from “September 1, 1939” that Auden changed yet did not improve: “We must love one another and die.” (He substituted “and” for “or” in 1955)
Ethernan’s retreat to the Caves looks like an attempt to get away from it all, including the poor with whom he is identified and the so-called religious authorities. “A visitation” begins: “Paul, why are you here? / I would sooner send my spirit out walking between the hailstones // than have you drive it to its corner on the fork of your advice[.]” The interlocutor might be the apostle or Paul the Hermit who, according to another poem, an otter brought fish to for thirty years. “A Vision” is of an apostle, and not altogether welcome: “he didn’t seem right, St. Luke / in the dream, he was not mild / and with my own voice bade me look[.]”
Each of the book’s three sections includes a sequence of “Ethernan” poems; and each section begins with a poem of sonnet-length titled with a series of numbers, the exact longitude and latitude of certain caves. The first describes an approach from the sea:
Landward, the cave mouth conspicuously dark.
Halfway between Anstruther and Crail,
singular in the vicinity. Prominent
calcareous sandstone outcrop on a raised beach
level, short lengths of passage
and as spectacularly weathered as the coexistence
of good and evil, the earth pigments.
Like Bishop, Solie always takes pleasure in delicious mouthfuls of consonants and vowels. Consistent with her practice, Solie does not quote directly but, careful to give credit where credit’s due, she notes: “Some phrases and details supporting the passages titled with coordinates appear in the Forth Yacht Clubs Association’s guide to the Caiplie Caves and the Hermit’s Well.” Could the guide’s writer have offered such striking comparisons to the work of weathering?
Anchor in five metres, taking care to avoid
the numerous creel markers. At half-tide
a dinghy may be hauled out where the reef buffers
flat rocks, though they are sharp
and landing delicate, if land you must.
Wind may complicate return to the boat. Any visit
is a lesson in how quickly conditions change.
Read with an eye for the source in a guidebook, the poem sounds different, more exacting. What at first sight look like descriptions of landmarks might also be advice offered in the resigned tone of one expecting to be ignored. Rescue must have been required more than once. The admirable understatement of the final sentence almost lets the reader forget, as the visitor might, that to visit Caiplie Caves is to time travel.
The book’s final poem begins in fragments: “In the centre of the path / near the ruined bothy.” The second couplet records her first impressions: “Styrofoam maybe, / a sweater, fishing gear.” These guesses are crucial to understanding what she identifies, in the poem’s first complete sentence, as a gannet. The second complete sentence both adds to and qualifies her knowledge: “How long, then, / before I realized it was dead?” Too often a poet’s meditation on loss comes at the expense of the individual creature that prompts it. Not so in Solie. Her study of zoology is reflected in her diction and in the care she always takes to account for the particulars of the creaturely. In fact, her perceptual mistake is not a mistake: there is more garbage than there are gannets; and the more garbage there is, the fewer gannets there will be.
If the discourse of taxonomy and associated natural sciences risk denaturing individual death, that’s not what happens in ”Clarity.” From the short length of its lines to its provisional conclusions, it is a master class in restraint, of limits accepted. While not the last lines, these offer an unsparing, honest admission.
Much of what I feared then
has happened,
though not always
as I’d feared.
And so much more to fear
than I’d imagined.
The first two couplets are downbeat, sounding the depths of her low expectations. The third is different, inflecting all that comes before.
A close reader of Solie might consider “Clarity” as a kind of summing up of all that has come before. For what she has got clear—and what she makes me feel—is the invasion and occupation of the imagination by waste. I may come to the seashore to watch the seabirds, but garbage, the indestructible leavings of human desire, is what I will find. Garbage is our legacy. A good capitalist might restore the bothy, pave the path—if there wasn’t good money in ecotourism, in keeping such places “wild.” By the end of The Caiplie Caves, the coast of Scotland—its residents also famous for getting up on their hind legs—starts to resemble the “Cave Bear.” “Extinction adds value.” Until it doesn’t.