Shortlisted for the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Collection
'Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken' - Michael Hofmann, LRB
'Half-expertise and half-magic . . . Wellwater is a terrifying book - and a masterly one. Solie is as good as poetry gets' - Declan Ryan, Telegraph
Wellwater 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
'Sometimes didactic and anecdotal, always matter-of-fact, Solie is a philosophical conversationalist . . . This is a well-timed book addressing our moment of climatic turbulence' - Kit Fan, Obsever
'A wry and buoyant playfulness walks a tightrope with frank appraisal . . . The result is a work of political profundity and linguistic dexterity that constantly surprises.' - Susannah Dickey, PEN Heaney Prize-winning author of ISDAL and Tennis Lessons
Rezensionen / Stimmen
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 * Her expansive, talkative lines unpack tight domestic spaces jam-packed with childhood memories as well as the awesome vistas of vast, dust-filled Canadian landscapes. Sometimes didactic and anecdotal, always matter-of-fact, Solie is a philosophical conversationalist . . . This is a well-timed book addressing our moment of climatic turbulence -- Kit Fan * Observer * Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken -- Michael Hofmann * London Review of Books * Powerful, philosophical, intelligent . . . [Solie is] especially adept at pulling great wisdom from the ordinary -- Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, and Carl Phillips * Griffin Poetry Prize Judges' Citation * A poet of the modern, cross-country journey * Guardian * Karen Solie is a star of Canadian poetry -- Ange Mlinko * New York Review of Books * Karen Solie's Wellwater is brilliant - one of my favourite collections of recent times. Blending the incompatible lexicons of the corporate and the non-human, Solie denaturalises the schemas of land and property ownership, rendering strange that which is all too frequently taken to be normal. A wry and buoyant playfulness walks a tightrope with frank appraisal, as Solie details our growing alienation to the natural world. The result is a work of political profundity and linguistic dexterity that constantly surprises -- Susannah Dickey, PEN Heaney Prize-winning author of <i>ISDAL</i> and <i>Tennis Lessons</i> Deeply philosophical . . . Lines that fall on the ear like a guilty pleasure . . . Erudite and magnificent * Irish Times * Those of us who live by poetry look forward, with a famished sort of envy, to a book by Karen Solie . . . Solie may be the great philosopher-poet of the bewildered, de-wilded West . . . Every poem is quotable . . . Perfectly judged. -- Camille Ralphs * The Tablet * [Solie] turns her attention to a landscape or scene, applying her intelligence and observational skills until she uncovers a profound truth. Solie's honesty can cut through the cant we often call poetry with moments of sudden, stunning clarity -- Clare Pollard * Poetry Review *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-1-0350-4819-9 (9781035048199)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Karen Solie grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. She is the author of five previous collections of poetry - Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, and The Caiplie Caves - 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. Wellwater is her sixth collection.
