Early on in her latest collection, the Canadian poet Karen Solie apologises: “I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful.” The line appears in a poem, Red Spring, about agribusiness and its sinister human impact: the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate, is “advertised as non-persistent; but tell that to Dewayne Johnson // and his non-Hodgkin lymphoma”. In 2018, a jury ruled that Monsanto’s glyphosate weedkiller, Roundup, caused the former groundskeeper’s cancer.
Solie’s admission – that real horror can’t be prettified – recalls Noor Hindi’s viral 2020 poem, Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying. We can’t “treat poetry like it’s some kind of separate thing” to what’s going on around us, says Solie, speaking to me in Soho, London, the morning after finding out she has won the TS Eliot prize for her collection Wellwater. “We all have to keep our eyes open”, but “that doesn’t mean we can’t say we’re scared, because it’s scary”.
The poet, 59, grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada, and is now based between Toronto and St Andrews, Scotland, where she teaches half-time at the university. She began writing poetry in her early 30s, publishing her first collection in 2001. Wellwater is her sixth collection, and was also the joint winner of the Forward prize last October.
Whether she is writing about agrochemical monopolies or housing insecurity or wildfires, Solie doesn’t once drop her gaze. While the question of art’s role in times of crisis is “a very old one”, the difference now “is that everything feels so accelerated”, Solie says. “There have been other times of crisis”, but now there is a “sense of things careening towards some kind of head”. We “have to feel like human beings with a spirit in order to do anything about anything”, but there are interests that “thrive on us being distracted and divided”. Art is “so crucial, because it counteracts that”.
Many of the poems in Wellwater centre on plants and animals. What quickly becomes clear is that Solie is fascinated by the creatures we take for granted, and, as she puts it, “things that are so ubiquitous as to disappear in one’s landscape”. There are poems about climbing vines, rats, “the mash” – a Newfoundland term for bogs. “They’re so common, and that interests me,” says Solie. “To look again at some of those things and to make them remarkable again.” Much of this transformation is a humanisation: grasses “pass teaspoons of silence” up a slope, sheep “find a nave // in which to say / their panicked rosaries”.
Solie believes her sympathy for nature’s overlooked species “might have something to do with where I’m from, which is a place that is very beautiful, but not in an overt way”. She grew up in a part of Saskatchewan where there are “no mountains” – “it’s mostly fields, crops, and it’s quite flat”, but still “very beautiful”.
As a child, Solie was a big reader. She attended a small rural school, with eight people in her class. “Its resources were not the best, but there were always books in the house – not poetry but novels and short stories.” Her father, to whom Wellwater is dedicated, and who died in 2024 before she completed the collection, owned a book called A World of Great Stories. “I read this many times as a kid, even though it contains some things that are not entirely appropriate for children, and that’s really where it started.”
Solie didn’t get into poetry until much later, at university in her mid-20s, after working as a reporter for several years. She studied at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, and took a contemporary poetry course in her third year. The feeling she had experienced with short stories – “the magic of reading a sentence, and it’s just a sentence, but it evokes this physical response” – she found with poetry too.
The “whole crowd” she encountered in that first class – WH Auden, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore – made a lasting impression. A writer who “cracked something open” for her later on was Tomas Tranströmer. Anne Carson has “always been important”. And the work of younger poets, including two shortlisted for this year’s TS Eliot, Isabelle Baafi and Catherine-Esther Cowie, has been “revitalising”.
Before Wellwater, Solie had published five collections: Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road in Is Not the Same Road Out and The Caiplie Caves, for which she was nominated for the TS Eliot prize in 2019. She has for several years taught in the UK, at Manchester Metropolitan University before moving to St Andrews. The “financial cushion” that the TS Eliot prize brings will make it possible to focus on writing, says Solie. “And I’m going to be a very happy person when I pay off my credit card and see that zero balance, that’s going to be great.”
Winning the award – among the world’s most prestigious for poetry – is “incredibly encouraging”, she says. As a writer, “you spend a lot of time alone, and looking at the screen, and thinking of all of the ways that things could be better. There’s a lot of self-doubt – there has to be, in order to produce anything good.” So having the book recognised is “just lovely”.
Of her practice, Solie says that she is not someone who can “just write things out quickly”. “I’m a word-by-word person,” she says. “Things take me a lot of time, I’m very slow. So sometimes things evolve through many, many revisions.”
In Wellwater, slotted between poems about nature are others about urban spaces, malls and bad apartments. In the opening poem, Basement Suite, Solie tells us: “In the basement one is closer to God because / closer to consequence, to creatures no one loves / but the specialists”. In another, Toronto the Good, she writes of “The parade / of baffling flats we viewed, advertised as ‘funky,’ ‘quirky,’ // were tiny museums of illegality / we convinced ourselves weren’t bad.” “The backdrop to all this is how unaffordable Toronto has become,” says Solie. Many people “have been pushed into this succession of temporary accommodations”. It’s “infuriating to see the direction that so many cities have gone”, and difficult to see a realistic way back, she says.
Whether environmental or personal, there’s “a lot of loss in the book”, says Solie. “But I hope as well there’s some kind of gesture past all of that.” The penultimate poem, Starcraft, written after her father’s death, reaches for this, imagining “compartments of another world sliding past / this one. Or another dimension. I like that better. / … / … It would mean / you aren’t gone, just out of frame.”
• Wellwater by Karen Solie is published by Picador. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
