Where Have You Been? (27 page)

Quoting will come, but it is hell, and you need to know that. Solie doesn't write many short poems—say, twelve lines or fewer. They are wonderful as well (“Untitled,” “The Prime Minister,” “Pigeon”) but somehow atypical; her standard length is a full page and upward, say, thirty to fifty lines—
pace
the author, more like a medium-haul engine. So I eye up a passage in a longer poem, and before long I know neither where to stop nor where to begin. I go on to another one. Same deal. A review—a representation—of the poems is utterly beyond me if I can't even take representative bites out of them: I am left staring down at their beguiling, unassimilable teem and squirm. There is hardly a poem in
The Living Option
that I wouldn't cite with alacrity and delight. I could write out the table of contents (Solie has wonderful titles: “Your News Hour Is Now Two Hours” or “Cardio Room, Young Women's Christian Association” or “Your Premiums Will Never Increase!” As good as anything by Eno.) I am floundering. The only reservation I have about the book is that it leaves out a number of other, equally marvelous poems. Perhaps that's where I should begin: the
livre des refusés
, grief at omission? (Though please understand that there is more than enough in
The Living Option
to overwhelm any new reader—65 poems out of a total of 143 in the three books, plus 26 new pieces.)

Enough with the computations. Take the first poem in Solie's first book, a sly little shocker called “Eating Dirt.” There's a home movie, it seems, of the author in infancy, a sessile toddler, “huge and white on the just-turned plot. / An early grinning vegetable / sprung up overnight, feeding / methodically, in fistfuls.” Yes, dear reader, she is doing what it says in the title. With grave charm, Solie worries “at the wisdom / of this documentary, its complicity / in my vice, where it has led.” “After all,” she says sagely, it's not as though she doesn't know: “some cravings / are only charming when you're small.” So what does she do in the poem? Knock it on the head, desist, reform, try something else, cold turkey? Not a bit of it. She carries on, taking care to do it secretly, though she tells us about it, and it sounds worse than anything before, with “lick” and “fingers” and “private”: “I've since learned, / when potting houseplants, / to lick my fingers / in private.” The poem establishes Solie in her East of Eden terrain (no pun), which is the less than ideal, the less than attractive, the recidivist, the unlucky, even the cursed and doomed. The poem pushes me toward another instaurational poem, by another farm child: “Digging,” the first poem in Seamus Heaney's
Death of a Naturalist
. Both are poems that lay claim to a slightly unexpected, even slightly implausible, persistence, while acknowledging that their makers have left the straight way: one digs with his pen, the other retires to eat dirt.

Or take another unadopted poem, one or two along in
Short Haul Engine
, “Boyfriend's Car,” annotated by me as “such a great poem!” Every word dangerous, every word a specification: “Black Nova. Jacked up. Fast. / Rhetorical question. Naturally, / a girl would choose / the adult conspiracy / of smoked glass, darkened interiors. / Privacy. Its language / of moving parts, belts, / and unfamiliar fluids.” Again, the fast puns, the spaces in the narration, the withdrawn third person, the fearless co-opting of abstractions (privacy, language, adult), the uneasy coexistence of power—or powerlessness—and glory, divine and human (surely Apollo hovers somewhere behind the poem). “Hair in the door handle, / white white arms / pretty against / the grain, the red” is as compressed and expressive as anything in Akhmatova (say, the polluted image of her braids in the man's pipe smoke). The finish is a split of pity and terror, maximized by the line breaks: “When she asked / to go home he said /
Well now that depends / on you
.” As she will go on to show in the “found” poems of
Modern and Normal
(say, the jock's monologue in “Bruce. After Last Call”), Solie has a dandy's ear for speech, others' as well as her own.

Take another excluded poem, from
Modern and Normal
, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Duncairn Dam.” A literary-, even a poetic-sounding title, one of precious few moments of suggestion or allusion (in view of the savage sneer of “reading Bly by night / Rand by day,” it's probably just as well for literature!). It's one of the great things about Solie: so much is primary, hasn't been written about before, pays no dues, does without obeisances or retreading or sheepishness. And when she does quote or refer in her poems, it's not from poets but philosophers and thinkers, which are her preferred form of accelerant or authority. (Hence the unusual thinkiness of her poems, their unfashionable tolerance for abstractions, and, not coincidentally, my difficulty in quoting from them.) Here, though, a touch of Wordsworth or Coleridge in the title, a bit of Romantic pleinairism and genius loci. And where are we? A fish camp. Somewhere an aggressive type of snail has kept away moneyed visitors, though in other respects conditions are favorable. Still, the place has failed to take off in the desired way. Ergo redneck heaven. It gets wonderfully dry, factual notations: “On the north side, squatters' cabins and planted / shade trees. Further up is the dump. Burn pit, fish guts, / trash. Recall the neighbours. You can't just do / whatever you want. There are certain kinds / of boating. Gull Lake's close. We all drive.” A kind of self-governance evolves, a highly specific ecosystem, the beginnings of a kind of history: “Simmie, adjacent, was a town once. The little plank church / makes a good photograph. Someone's junk is in it.” It's as perfect as a Walker Evans picture.

As Brodsky says, poets like Murray give you the living language, but you get the country thrown in, extra, no charge. It gets you thinking about the supposedly uninteresting condition of being Australian or being Canadian, of patterns of settlement in these supposedly uninteresting places without much history: that of Australia is peripheral, that of Canada (where 80 percent of the population lives within a hundred miles of the US border) is south-heavy. If Australia's a beach with a pretense of no hinterland (“the bush, or as we now say the Land, / the three quarters of our continent / set aside for mystic poetry,” as Les Murray caustically remarks in “Louvres”), Canada's a frontier, an enterprise zone that frays to the north and very rapidly gets very thin on top. (Australia is afraid of what it contains, Canada of what it abuts; both, setting more store by what's underneath than what's on the surface, have declared their entrails open for business.) There are edgeland atmospheres and experiences and conditions that you don't find anywhere else, settled, unsettled, resettled, unsettling:

The store, next to the beverage room, sells smokes

and low-end booze, rat traps, potato wedges, shampoo,

Raid, ice cream, cribbage boards, Crazy Glue,

buffalo wings, rubber gloves, line and lures,

etc. Leeches can be purchased from the pop machine

outside, a half-dozen for $1.25. A sweet life:

Coke, Seven-Up, water, bait. You could walk from the lake

but no one does.

“Sweet” there may look like irony, but it's nothing of the kind. The higgledy-piggledy catalog is notably unjudgmental: pure repertorial anthropology.

If I am allowed one more
lamentoso
description of an excluded poem, then perhaps the one called “Four Factories” from
Pigeon
. Like “Eating Dirt,” it's what it says on the packet: one mystery software plant (?), one potato chip factory, one cement works, one abattoir. Each section is beautifully couched in its specific speak, with its individual lighting, its angle, aperture, exposure, and problems. The high-tech acquires a cloak of sumptuously neoteric blarney, “opportune spinoffs, low-slung / by-product support outfits named in functional / shorthand.” The chip factory is more honest, more straightforward, and is celebrated for its simple garishness: “It's painted a bright and not entirely baffling / turquoise, for who would want / their snacks to issue from a dour scene?” (The eighteenth-century reasonableness of tone here and elsewhere is one of Solie's great inventions: a pained elevation.) The cement factory walks us through chemistry (“Pity the diatoms, first to go, trout eggs / choked by sediment in gravelly streambeds, / ducks in chloride runoff. Pity us, / we're all messed up about it”) to a rapturous upland vision of commerce, again in the necessary argot: “in condos, dude ranches, / four-season resorts, the demand for improved / infrastructure and amenities in the recreational / community of Lac des Arc.” The abattoir is described in fast cutup, with slabs of critical and actual promotional language slid along on conveyors: “The Canadian / Forces steps up its recruitment // campaign. Our industry's future remains / secure. Additional openings in rendering / and hides. Animals are not our friends. Sign / on the highway,
Always, 100 Jobs!
” “Four Factories” reads to me almost like a dissident Russian poem (or dissident Sophoclean chorus): how tremendous that all this exists—and how tremendously sad. “Pity us.”

Solie is expert in mobility and cheap tenancy—perhaps these too are preconditions for the modern poet. The poem “Drift” ends: “This is him, going, / This is her, gone.” The poems seem to have been generated in dozens of places and the distances between them: “Days Inn,” “Salmon River Motel,” “Java Shop, Fort MacLeod”; “In Passing, “Skid,” “Driving Alone,” “Rental Car,” “Medicine Hat Calgary One-Way.” Solie has measured out her life in motor vehicles: “an even-tempered '68 Volvo” and “a blue Mercury parked at the edge of the continent”; “the old Ford” and “cursing ancestors and old Volkswagens”; a “mid-century Case” and the titanic “Buhler Versatile 2360,” hero of the beautiful poem “Tractor”; the cute “freshly birthed Fusions” outside a Ford plant and the “rows / of wrecked cars in the junkyards, / hoods open like a choir.” After Heaney and Murray, she is the great poet of driving, but she is more radical than they are. She is prey to a sort of nomadism that feels more like claustrophobia or serial eviction than tourism. She is equally adept at looking out or back, at looking, and at imagining being seen. “In the language / of local economies you are table 12, / room 105,” goes the passive version in “Driving Alone,” “Pure transaction. / A sure thing of money changing hands.” Against that, there are passages like: “Motel the orange of an old rind, bud green / and remaindered blue for trim. Some schemes / shouldn't work, but do. A square room / with balcony two floors above the strip. Real / keys” (“Possibility”). The “real / keys” are sublime. The poems show their familiarity with the short run, the short term, the short straw: “Eight yards to the motel office, one more / to ring the bell. The ice machine means well, a grey slab / I attend with my bucket. I've been here before, / paced it off and slept beneath a sheet / forty feet from the highway” (“More Fun in the New World”). It's not a complaint (it's not a TripAdvisor review or a slumming Baedeker), this is what there is, these are our tawdry surfaces and circumstances, this is what life has unexpectedly dished up: “A doorknob // came off in my hand like a joke prosthetic. / Rooms like this have followed me around / for 20 years. It's as though I married into a bad / family of many cousins. I was the only one // who loved them. That's what I thought” (“Conversion”).

I like personal poems and have mostly quoted from Solie's. But the fact is that the individual “I” and the dual “we” are just three of the figures on her carousel. (It is striking that her oeuvre as a whole is as interesting and as intricately and cleverly put together as each individual poem—those fractals that she also writes about, in action.) She has a gift for the plural, the collective scene—intelligent, ironic, scrutinized, as everything is with her—that is rare in good Western poetry. Her synoptics are wonderful, in “Alert Bay, Labour Day,” in “The Girls,” in “Erie.” She writes about moments when the individual docks or attempts to dock or fails to dock with what I believe Heidegger called “
das man
” (the impersonal, collective “one”). The great poem “Medicine Hat Calgary One-Way” sets out with—how to describe that tone: meekness, po-faced sedition, sober hilarity: “The bus is a wreck, and passengers / respect that”: one idly wonders how such respect might manifest itself. By sitting extra still, or spitting, or smoking—perhaps as in that “family restaurant in which smoking, // active or passive, was unofficially / mandatory” (“Erie”). Or take “Prayers for the Sick,” where patients waiting in a Toronto emergency ward are unexpectedly taken out of themselves and given a common purpose by their fury at a short TV loop showing the detestable, record-breaking—and currently banned—Yankees' baseball star and all-round bad hat, Alex Rodriguez, and his “dirty trick on our rookie.” There is a sense here of convergence, of fellowship offered and taken, of the warmth of the tribe. In other poems, like “Three in the Afternoon” (“Stalled hour. Hour / of chronics. Never / is anything not done / less so”), the speaker retains her unhappy separateness, “while across municipalities / workers stride the day toward / the dinners they deserve.” The becalmed artist of three o'clock is like a “parasite” in a Soviet reality: doesn't stride, deserves no dinner, is left like (Solie's fellow Norwegian) Edvard Munch to stare into the blank eyes (“as if recently brainwashed,” as Sylvia Plath wrote) of the crowd on Karl Johansgatan.

And then there are those collectives that are deaf to the siren chant of the human—because they are other species. It is to them that Solie's special respect and admiration goes out (she once studied zoology): “Sturgeon,” “Toad,” “Wild Horses,” “Pest Song,” “Mole,” “Thrasher,” “Gopher”: “We turn / our ankles where you've been and bust your heads / for fun.” Creatures that don't need us or undermine us, that live off us or against us, that are older than us, keener and subtler and better adapted. These are upsetting, gallant, Lawrentian poems (“Wild Horses”):