It is always a bonus when a tip turns out to be a winner. I picked up on this recent UK release from another website. It sounded right although one can't always be sure until you find out for yourself. I have had several tips from friends that have turned into big favourites of my own (Patrick Hamilton, The Magnetic Fields, Alan Hollinghurst) and I commandeer them as if they had been mine all along.
This is a selection from Karen Solie's first three volumes of poems plus a section of new poems. They are assured, confident and impressive from the first with their realistic, empirical and less deceived attitude doing everything that the blurb claims they do. The pitch is as good as a poem in itself,
Her poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love, desire and the eros of danger, constantly exposing the fragility of the basis of trust on which modern humanity relies.
In Lucky, a stranger
won't be remembered
leaving that Chevron, walking
flat-out into a brand new
minute.
and is 'released like an idea into the future'. Such is the fragility but such is the unbounded potential of being unrooted.
Much of the poetry is about being in transit, in between places, travelling or in either/or situations that contain a vulnerability but it also incorporates that fragility into its own being. Although there is little else Keatsian about Karen Solie's poems, one has a sense of his idea of 'negative capability' which is, it says elsewhere, 'the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems'.
There is recurringly the unresolved condition of Gunn's motorcyclists in On the Move or August Kleinzahler's sense of stoic resolve.
In One Night Stand,
He drove through
2000 miles of rain, he said,
only to find me at the continent's
end. His gift to me. And mine to him
that I would not think of him again.
is like Caza Mendoza, with its Kleinzahler landscape,
south of the Nabisco factory
and water treatment plant amid sports bars,
tarp shops, dealerships, and self-
storage, one of a strip doomed by the geologic
headway of condominiums aspiring to Miami
where, in that particular encounter,
Above that, little brown bats,
though they flew in dwindling numbers, flew nonetheless.
We knew it couldn't last. And then it did.
She describes the contingent nature of existence but is unfazed by it, is perhaps enervated by anxiety and resistant to false securities, and would appear to thrive without reassurance and celebrates uncertainty.
The world has, for the most part, gone to bad but she sees in a length of rusty pipe its 'baroque filigree', and appreciates in Medicine Hat Calgary One-Way,
Your lives are neither
before nor behind you.
It is impossible to pick poems that are more thematically significant, more important or 'better' than any others. It is a book without stand-out poems because she is one of those rare poets whose work is consistent and consistently excellent. The elegy, Spiral, though, is one of the most memorable in a book that will demand to be returned to for a long time to come. It is a poem of displacement, both in the life of the deceased and by hearing of his death when on Skye,
where the wind in its many directions is directionless
and impossible to put your back to.
But it turns its meditation on loneliness and alienation into a realization of plenty and a celebration in its way of the life lost and the lives remaining.
I have read a number of good books of poems so far this century, so far this millennium. Those by Julia Copus and David Harsent come most readily to mind. This book is at least as good as any of them.
