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Quill & Quire
Karen Solie achieved near-instant acclaim with the multiple award nominations and wins heaped on her first collection, Short Haul Engine. If her excellent follow-up, Modern and Normal, didn’t prove outright that Solie wasn’t resting on her laurels, then Pigeon, the Saskatchewan-raised, Toronto-based poet’s latest effort, should put all doubts to rest. If I were to coin a genre for this work, I’d call it “dystopian sublime.” Solie has a knack for limning scenes of industrial wastelands – be they factories in east Etobicoke or Chemical Alley’s refineries “[a]t the nominal limits of Edmonton” – and the going-nowhere lives of atomized, disenfranchised individuals. Her poems make them beautiful without romanticizing them. Many of the poems are explicitly concerned with problems of technology and the environment, but they don’t pander to any simple political stance. In one, the speaker gets pissed off about the “car alarms, panic attacks, canine/ episodes, migraines,// childhood hearing loss” caused by the CNE air show, but the rhythmic élan of the poem’s catalogues makes it more lively invective than dumbed-down diatribe. Pigeon’s first line is a modified dictionary definition: “[o]ligotrophic: of lakes and rivers.” The book is indeed river-riddled and lake-pocked. One thing that makes Solie’s work so appealing is that it is as in touch with the wide open spaces and waterways of this country as it is with the concrete canyons and sprawl of its polyglot cities, where most of us now live. She is especially good at writing about the intersections of city and wilderness, such as Toronto’s “[rivers] underfoot,/ paved over” or the man-made waterfall on Edmonton’s High Level Bridge. Pigeon doesn’t represent a departure from – or reinvention of – Solie’s established style, which is lyrical but gritty, intellectual but tough-talking, colloquial yet elegant. But she isn’t standing still, either. One of the weaknesses of Solie’s earlier work, an over-reliance on anti-poetic glibness, is notably diminished in this book. She hasn’t abandoned sarcasm and wry irony, but modulates them better as she delves deeper into the social and geological bedrock of our civilization. This is her strongest book yet.
Review
As much as Pigeon sings with metaphor and language-love, it is also infused with a subtle formality that feels like listening to the echoing footsteps of someone walking by deep in thought...In wilderness, perhaps self-discovery, but also distance and solitude exist. Solie provides all three. (Globe and Mail 20090409)
Karen Solie has established herself as one of Canada's best lyric poets...Pigeon deals out fearlessness, humour, and raw experience, one killing line after another...Among the arts, poetry has the most human of values, and among poets, few are as deeply human as Solie. Her poems respond to the many ways a day can come to us, while seeming to discover and name new constants of the heart. (NUVO 20100529)
Lyrical but gritty, intellectual but tough-talking, colloquial yet elegant...as she delves deeper into the social and geological bedrock of our civilization. This is [Solie's] strongest book yet. — Quill & Quire (Quill & Quire 20100528)
Solie has found a technique that others could only envy. (Richard Greene National Post )
Pigeon...shows why [Solie] has become one of the most admired Canadian poets of her generation. (Paul Vermeersch Globe and Mail )
Karen Solie has established herself as one of Canada's best lyric poets...Pigeon deals out fearlessness, humour, and raw experience, one killing line after another...Among the arts, poetry has the most human of values, and among poets, few are as deeply human as Solie. Her poems respond to the many ways a day can come to us, while seeming to discover and name new constants of the heart. (NUVO 20100529)
Lyrical but gritty, intellectual but tough-talking, colloquial yet elegant...as she delves deeper into the social and geological bedrock of our civilization. This is [Solie's] strongest book yet. — Quill & Quire (Quill & Quire 20100528)
Solie has found a technique that others could only envy. (Richard Greene National Post )
Pigeon...shows why [Solie] has become one of the most admired Canadian poets of her generation. (Paul Vermeersch Globe and Mail )
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5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Closing time in the gardens of the West, Mar 5 2012
By Simon G. Barrett - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Pigeon: Poems (Paperback)
- the only/animal who kills from a distanceGuess who?
More accessible than the fractionally less good Modern and Normal - the brief title poem, in fact, the most elliptical of the collection - Canadian Solie here gets close to the ticking heart of North America - or should that be ticking bomb? Bitter humour (Team members/should expect to be called team members), a bleak and sweeping feel for 'the long 20th century' (many things were good/while they lasted), empathy coupled with with alienation (extinction adds value; the infinite patience born of reliance/on mass transit)
In Part III Solie's scientific savvy shades into the merely picturesque, wind farms as minimalist daisies, hanging gardens/of electrical transformers, but 'the horror, the horror' is of course aesthetic as well; a Demonstration Centre..pink to orange in the failing light, like a patient,/worsening. As in Modern and Normal (chilling title!), there's 'nowhere you'd want to walk'. By car, though, off-piste you're 'a criminal/with a small window of opportunity/in the anonymous glory/of the itinerant moment'
This is a poetry of ideas as well as feelings ('drunk as young corn'; our 'one chance on this earth') and, as I hope I've shown, eminently, almost indecently quotable
- ..the available portfolio
- of non-prescription medication expands softly
- as the evening around us
- if you believe it's worse never to have tried,
- then you haven't really tried
- Days of my youth,
- you never appreciated me, and now I'm gone
(shades of 'America I gave you everything and now I'm nothing' without the gradiloquent fakery?)
How do you categorise this stuff? In a postscript to my review of Modern and Normal I said Solie liked rust. She also has a thing for hawks (We love him/from afar. Soon, we will have to have him) and she's quite the hawk herself. This does what Modern and Normal did, but more.. sorrowfully
- days wind down/around the campfire of the television
Tractor would make a good start. It terrified me. As Migration baldly states, 'we're all/that's left'
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