Karen Solie’s new collection, Wellwater, will be published next year. She teaches creative writing at St Andrew’s.
Prayer in the throat of a non-believeroffered up to the absent hereafter,his two long notes and descending warbleput him at the centre of things.A partial method, he knows, is no method;but when you are too weak for beauty’sstartlement, when you desire not silencebut the peace of vague and benign
neglect, at decibels audible overthe wind, radio, tyres through gravel,through the open...
Why, after so many years, is she with me now?We who were not close in lifewalk among the caribou lichen
whose coral-like low forms, white against the mossesand wild blueberry in its red phase,seem to give off light.
She has escapedthrough the window of the body’s house of harminto the freedom of a truth that will never be recognised.
And indeed they do give off light, fungi and algaein a...
Returning home from evening massin the big car,
they were like canal boats thensliding through the loose gravel, in the back seat
she pushed my cuticles upwith a silver file not unpainfully
to expose the half-moons, she saidGod put them there, he likes to see them.
An empty bottle rolled under the passenger seatand back out again
as my grandfather droveone foot on the gas, one on the brake,
it was a...
Surprised on returning to find the flat flooded with light. Merciless, evaporative, even when overcast, and, as the solstice neared, sanctimonious in its imperative to productivity. An expert with his pen-light wondering how you let it get this bad. That tone. We were out all day in the clarity of errors that had multiplied into reality. Extra weight exposed by the indignity of...
Like a king from a promontory the kestrel presides from an updraft, an array of barely perceptible movements sustaining balance and attention, and the woodmouse, the shrew, the secondary characters, know whose watch they’re under. There are no
bystanders among them. The razorbill’s piety winters at sea, is secular and medium-sized, black above, white below; while, frontloaded...
Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: ‘It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call...
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