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''Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken'' - Michael Hoffman, LRB Wellwater, by Karen Solie, demonstrates a poet writing at the height of her powers. In poems that are supple, philosophical, bracingly honest and ribbed with erudition, Wellwater conducts a self-interrogative conversation with a culture in crisis and a natural world on the brink. Thresholds abound, ''doors between dimensions'' where past selves or lost loved ones speak to us again: ''death is not Saskatchewan'' shrugs one encountered soul, ''we don''t all know each other in this place''. Solie excels as a laureate of the transitory, of ''baffling flats... tiny museums of illegalities'', motel rooms exuding a ''low hum of menace''. Her roving, syntactically elegant poems will often resolve in disarming directness, a precise admission of the emotional stakes. Karen Solie is increasingly recognised as one of the essential voices in world poetry. Wellwater will delight those already in the know, while new readers of her work will be astonished. ''Powerful, philosophical, intelligent . . . [Solie is] adept at pulling great wisdom from the ordinary'' - Griffin Prize judges Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie and Carl Phillips
About the author
Karen Solie grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. She is the author of six collections of poetry -
Short Haul Engine,
Modern and Normal,
Pigeon,
The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out,
The Caiplie Caves and
Wellwater - which have won the Dorothy Livesay Award, Pat Lowther Award, Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Griffin Prize, and been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
The Living Option: Selected Poems, was published in the UK in 2013. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, Karen Solie teaches half-time for the University of St Andrews in Scotland and lives the rest of the year in Canada.
Report
An almost unreasonably wonderful book . . . Solie is a brilliant cartographer of the feckless and the careless, of the ways in which inhumanity has an impact on the minutiae of our daily lives . . . Half-expertise and half-magic . . . Solie is an exquisite phrasemaker, analogist, blender of idioms, aphorist - and all these overlapping gifts create images, phrases, whole poems that take your breath away . . . Wellwater is a terrifying book - and a masterly one. Solie, for me, is as good as poetry gets Declan Ryan Telegraph
