Karen Solie’s Wellwater arrived last week, before it won the Governor-General’s Award, and its ascension (not the first accolade Solie’s writing has received) prompted me to bring it along to read on the train.
It’s astonishing, so much so that I don’t know what to say about it. My first reading, against the sound of strangers’ conversations and the tick-tack of steel wheels on steel rails, feels too shallow to have given me anything worth saying. Perhaps after I read it again? I’ve signed up for a Zoom discussion, led by Victoria’s former poet laureate, Yvonne Blomer, that’ll happen in a couple of weeks, and that’ll give me some encouragement to reread this book.
I can do two things right now, though. One is to link to Nicholas Bradley’s review of Wellwater, published in The Walrus. Since most books published in Canada don’t get reviews, never mind in a slick monthly magazine, that is a sign of Solie’s importance. The second is to present one of the sonnets that appear close to the book’s conclusion. It’s a contemporary sonnet, without a pattern of end rhyme, but it has 14 lines and is arranged into an octave and a sestet (although the former spills into the latter):
Meadowlark
Prayer in the throat of a nonbeliever
offered up to the absent hereafter,
his two long notes and descending warble
put him at the centre of things.
A partial method, he knows, is no method;
and when you are too weak for beauty’s
startlement, when you desire not silence
but the peace of vague and benign
neglect, at decibels audible over
the wind, radio, tires through gravel,
through the open driver’s window
his song is like arrows of pure math
straight into whatever the heart is,
its still unbroken land, its native grasses.
Why that poem and not another? Selfishness. I love the meadowlark’s song, like any other Saskatchewanian who’s heard it, and the walks I took while researching my new book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, were conducted under its “two long notes and descending warble.” This poem reminds me of that spring and summer, although there was no radio or sound of “tires through gravel,” nor any open windows: just the wind, my footsteps, and the broken land with its fields of canola.