Discover the Unpredictable Brilliance of Prizewinning Poet Karen Solie

What keeps you reading is her unpredictability. Perhaps this is what makes her a poet’s poet: those who read a lot of the stuff like to be surprised. On Faith begins: “There was no reason/ not to believe/ the overgrown wells/ in abandoned yards/ still held water/ that, like all things forsaken,/ was ruined and dangerous.” This is a conventional opening, reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s Personal Helicon. But the double negative, and the odd idea of water as “ruined”, shows we are going to be wrong-footed. Who could predict that, after going on to consider hypnotism and belief in what’s fake, On Faith would end with cage wrestling between “The Stomper” and “Bret ‘the Hitman’ Hart”? This is the “different wavelength” Logan saw: no one else living would write this poem. • American poets are taking over — but are they better? Solie is almost an aphorist: “Money buys the knowledge it isn’t everything.” But this wisdom is always rooted in an everyday reality: “Smoking in the yard two weeks before Christmas/ out of the wind, under Orion,/ inhaling anger, exhaling sorrow,/ which is how anger metabolizes,/ the end product always a sorrow/ of remorse or failure.” Alongside the philosophy is an earthy sense of fun: “With mom and newborn brother in hospital,/ we left our square of lawn tied to the clothes horse/ shivering in back of the duplex and went every night to/ McDonald’s, my dad, little sister, and me,/ him not knowing what else to do with us./ And my god, it was glorious.” Solie’s voice is often deliberately flat and affectless. But this is the first TS Eliot prizewinner for ages with a sense of humour, humour that extends (even more unusually, in the po-faced poetry business) to self-mockery. That Which Was Learned in Youth Is Always Most Familiar details an argument with the poet’s nephew. He shows Aunt Karen how “there are two kinds of shapes./ Replaceable and irreplaceable shapes”. There are triangles and squares that can be copied many times. And then “a clod of earth. An accident. Will never happen again… He’s five. And not even I,/ who would sooner be right than happy,/ could argue.” • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what’s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Wellwater is not flawless. It’s too long. The flat-voiced matter-of-factness can be boring. The deliberate awkwardness of syntax (“I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful”) can irritate. Like many poetry collections indulgently edited, the best poems top and tail the book, and mediocre work hides out in the middle. Here we’re dealing with caribou lichen: “And indeed they do give off light, fungi and algae/ in a collaboration that obscures/ the individual collaborators/ who’ve taken it entirely off-spectrum,/ reflecting every wavelength and phosphorescing under the UV/ intensely where appearing most delicate,/ as though, as has been written, the best metaphor for stillness/ is constant motion.” Universal acclaim isn’t always good for you. But some poems — Meadowlark and Starcraft (see below) — are perfect, intense little miracles of power and craft. Overall, Wellwater is an enjoyable and impressive collection, and Karen Solie is a worthy winner. Starcraft The storm breaks down the day’s last hour. It slams through trees in the neighbour’s garden like air mechanically displaced by compartments of another world sliding past this one. Or another dimension. I like that better. Still of this world, which includes both what we know and can imagine. It would mean you aren’t gone, just out of frame, and might explain this halfway sense of being neither here nor there: where maybe, Dad, you and I, on the lake at dawn when the fish jump, in the 14-foot aluminium Starcraft and our contentment of few words, drift on water calm and grey as a room risen into just before it brightens, and I’m no longer frightened.