Pigeon
by Karen Solie
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-88784-823-0, 100 pp., $18.95 paper.

Karen Solie has blossomed into one of Canada's best writers. This is her third book. Her first, Short Haul Engine (2001), and her second, Modern and Normal (2005), were both published by Brick Books. Both won or were shortlisted for several awards, including the first being shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Charles Baudelaire, through the publication of Fleurs du mal in 1857, brought the city to poetry. Solie does the same for the suburbs. "Bone Creek" is an example where the inherent conflicts of city life emerge as a dream--or so we hope. Here "a man from nearby Z" (10) is causing difficulties for his neighbours. We are given the resolution:

. . . First I shot out his tires
and then I shot him. And that
was the end of that. I woke to everything
as I'd left it, but later, a morning lit
by the tail lights of summer
and the weekend edition face down
in the yard, swollen with dew,
general interest, product reviews
and more news of the wars. (11)

Even the metaphors bear an urban stamp, "tail lights of summer," a brilliant image of something rapidly leaving, accelerating away. Note the way Solie builds lists. First, "swollen with dew," followed by "general interest, product reviews and more news of the wars." She's taken a page from John Ashbery and done him one better. Note also in this incredible list the playfulness; the end rhyme of "dew" and "reviews" followed by the internal "news."

But Solie does not limit herself to the suburbs. She moves beyond them into the countryside. "Tractor" is a longing look at the simpler life. Here the Buhler Versatile 2360 tractor is the protagonist. But it also represents the farmer's lost skills, those skills that have been transferred over time to the city professionals:

In times of doubt, we cast our eyes
upon the Buhler Versatile 2360
and are comforted. And when it breaks down, or thinks
itself in gear and won't, for our own good, start,
it takes a guy out from the city at 60 bucks an hour
plus travel and parts, to fix it. (28)

Solie presents a unique view of life. Is it the influence of Donald Barthelme in a poetic guise that informs this new dimension? The disdain for the city "guy" coming out to repair a country icon and earning more than a farmer could ever hope to is registered in the vernacular she uses: "60 bucks an hour."

Solie's language is crisp and clean. There is no room for romanticism. Look at the title poem "Pigeon":

. . . The human brain,
three pounds soaking wet,
its attentions divided.
My attentions were divided.
Nevertheless, I saw what I saw. (33)

We never find out what it was the speaker saw. What we do find is a debt to imagism and Ezra Pound. The language here reminds one of "In a Station of the Metro" with its "petals on a wet, black bough."

The word "brilliant" frequently comes to mind when reading Solie. How can it be otherwise when you come across something like "Archive," with its nod to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its slice-of-life vignettes? But, alongside Joyce, you also must consider Barthelme, for it is the fusion of the two, along with a little Derrida, that makes this piece dance. The central "character" is a photograph. It could have been a photograph of anything. But, in this case: "Though it appears in the photograph as fog, snow is falling in its fractal specifics straight down onto the city." (34) But it's not just snow. It's a bridge and the photographer and the bird and the city and the so on and so forth and the things and the imagination of things that surround this bridge and that take place in the falling snow of the photograph. Or, as Solie says at the end, "All this is in the photograph. It is and it isn't." (41) The poetics presented here call to mind one of the main concepts of Buddhism--that of dependent arising, how everything is connected to everything else. And it's brilliant to include such a piece in a collection of poetry.

One of Solie's great poetic gifts is irony. She doesn't need to scream; just a delicate opposition does the trick. Like in "Parasitology":

Aboriginal people for generations described
this collision of valleys as a good place to meet,
but you shouldn't sleep here. So whites built
a town, a big hotel. Later, a Geomagnetic
Resonance Factor that screws up people's ions
was discovered, but by that time the gift
shops were thriving, so. (85)

The echoes from the word "collision" continue throughout this extraction, carrying into the conflict between "Aboriginal people" and "whites," a conflict captured in the level of language used to describe these groups. In this eco-poetic frame, Solie subtly contrasts the spiritual with the crass profit motive.

Rob McLennan, in his blog entry on Solie, says that it's not the awards that count but the quality of the writing. Solie's writing surpasses that standard.

John Herbert Cunningham is a Winnipeg writer. He reviews poetry in Canada for Malahat Review, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead and The Danforth Review, in the U.S. for Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Big Bridge and Galatea Revisits, and in Australia for Jacket.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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