Canadian poet Karen Solie's intricate sixth collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Wellwater, gilds the natural and human worlds with religious imagery and an environmentalist conscience.
Solie (The Caiplie Caves) writes engaging verse about grassland flora and fauna: caribou, foxes, yarrow, antelope, pine trees, and more. A well is a place of holy significance with a "cathedral's rock and temperature," a "site of worship/ from which song was drawn to feed the souls/ of planted trees." A meadowlark's call is described thus: "Prayer in the throat of a nonbeliever/ offered up to the absent hereafter." There are even comic biblical echoes, such as "a weevil to every purpose under heaven" in "Basement Suite." With unexpected metaphors and heavy doses of sibilance, the poems achieve a hypnotic grace: "Grasses pass teaspoons of silence/ each to each up the slopes of Eagle Butte"; "two cottonwoods built their circular staircases" and now, "in spring/ they champagne the air."
The 42 poems toggle between the material and the abstract; quotidian experiences fuel meditations on concepts such as intuition, kindness, and fate. "Horseshoe" wryly recasts a traditional emblem of luck through the story of one that fell off its doorway nail and killed a man. "Red Spring" espouses a fervent antipesticide message (and calls out the corporations Bayer and Monsanto by name), while "Toronto the Good" decries terrible landlords and shabby apartments. Solie finds meaning in unlikely subjects including a motel, a snowplow, and the Edmonton Mall.
Wellwater blends the everyday and the exceptional to striking effect. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck