Karen Solie

The 42 poems in this collection tend towards the lyric with nature and the conditions of the natural environment a common theme. The poems do not shout at the reader. They are quiet and contemplative and invite engagement at many levels. They are not tricksy. But they are subtle. And, especially on rereading, they begin to reveal hidden depths. They are grounded in the best sense of that word.

I can well imagine reading this collection many times over the years ahead. I am already looking show more forward to it.

Recommended. show less

3/5
Beautiful, modern, and full of anxiety, stress, fear, and grief over the changing world.

Out of the 42 poems, I only liked 18 of them. I found myself questioning some of them after I finished, I just couldn't get what I had just read. Many I found ended too short, even ones I liked, as if they never got finished.

Here are the ones I enjoyed:
The Trees in Riverside Park
"The trees are grand hotels closed for the season.
But below ground, social life is taking place."
8 That Which Was Learned in show more Youth Is Always Most Familiar
A beautiful poem about a child's wisdom

Red Spring
A poem about crops, chemicals, and outcomes. Akin to Percy Schmeiser v. Monsanto.
"{. . .} the earliest stage at which herbicides

may be applied — Luxxur™ for problematic grass weeds —
as white-railed fawns sleep inside wild chokecherry"

Autumn Day
Stark realities of trying to buy a home.

Toronto the Good
Returning to a place you used to live and seeing how unlivable it is now.

On Faith
"There was no reason
not to believe
the overgrown wells
in abandoned yards

still held water
that, like all things forgotten,
was ruined and dangerous."

Parables of the Rat
"And maybe a soul is a satellite,
a small idea orbiting a larger one, a device
to translate a signal
and send it back.

The rat is still a rat.
There is no getting around what we are."

Next Life
"[. . .]the spirit of her belongings, any remnants of utility and charm,

had chosen to accompany her into the next life. The world
used her right up, along with the little she'd been given.
But everything she'd been given she found a use for."

The Snowplow
"[. . .] The plow is a child of the north,
like Romanticism. And what a dad-rock moment

here on the sidewalk, watching the blade
at it's superb angle push everything before it"

The Grasslands
All that is Canada's grasslands; the good and bad; past and present. All of it: beautiful.
"until settlement — as settlement does,
without consultation, in violence and paperwork —
by the Dominion Lands Act of 1872"

Antelope
I don't even know, but the imagery was great.

Smoke
About the wildfires.
"though what arises is not clarity
but a set of new misgivings. Is this how the world will be
and not just how it is?"

Berkeley Hills, 2022
The personification of laurels was wonderful.
"Like girls do, the laurels grow
from the soil of a deep reserve."

Anne Dufourmantelle
" [. . .] names
are the nearest we can get
to truth."

The Barrens
I don't even know, it was just cute and I liked imagining the rabbits losing their keys in alleyways.

Prime Location
"it inhales the amnesia
of spores, light filters through
its soaped windows like light
through the soaped windows

of all the deconsecrated churches
awaiting resurrection as condos"

Orion
"Smoking in the yard two weeks before Christmas
out of the wind, under Orion,
inhaling anger, exhaling sorrow,
which is how anger metabolizes,
the end product always a sorrow
of remorse or failure. I would give this anger
to Orion, whom I've only recently learned to identify" show less

Solie's poetry is evocative of a time and place. Present will always be haunted by echoes of the past. To write the present any other way would be unfaithful to the nature of time.
In spite of some consternation with the abundance of similes and lack of metaphors, the collection is still rich with the poet's clever lines.
Solie's poems remind me there's a wild, moral joy at the centre of making metaphors. Her political allegory her interest in Canadian politics, addressing directly or show more indirectly, comically or seriously, political concerns that have shaped her Canadian identity.

While I could appreciate the artist, I found myself not being able to emotionally connect to the poems a lot of the time. I will definitely try to read more of Solie's work, hope to connect with it book in further works of the author show less

The Road in is Not the Same Road Out forced me to slow my reading due to the structure of the syntax and the breadth of images and addresses. In my favorite poems, such as "Bitumen, " the landscapes like the words rolled out into worlds that felt familiar and strange, as if a postcard I bought already written on yet came to believe I received in the mail.