Pigeon: Poems

by Karen Solie

Launched to prominence with her first collection of poems, Karen Solie continued her upward trajectory with Modern and Normal. Now, with Pigeon, this singer of existential bewilderment takes another step forward. She finds an analog for the divine in a massive, new model tractor and an analogue for the malign in the face of the New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez. Her poems are X-rays of delusions and mistaken perceptions, intellectual explorations of bad luck, creeping catastrophe, and the eros of danger come dressed to kill. Her ear is impeccable and her syntax the key to a rare, razor-sharp poetic intelligence. Pigeon expands Solie’s growing readership, making clear to anyone who encounters her that there is still fresh, unmapped territory in the world of poetry. As poet Michael Hofmann said, “Solie’s work should be read wherever English is read.”

Genres: Poetry, Canada

112 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2009

About the author

Prize-winning and internationally celebrated poet Karen Solie grew up on her family's farm in rural Saskatchewan. She was educated at the University of Lethbridge and the University of Victoria. She has taught English at the University of Victoria and poetry at the Banff Centre for the Arts Writing Studio. Solie has also served as writer-in-residence at universities and arts centres across the country, including the University of Alberta and the University of New Brunswick. Karen Solie is one of Canada's leading contemporary lyric poets.

Reviews

[Liisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I have dissolved / like an aspirin in water watching a bee walk into/ the foyer of a trumpet flower, in the momentary/ solace of what has nothing to do with me, brief/ harmony of particulars in their separate orbits,/ before returning to my name, to memory's warehouse/ and fleet of specialized vehicles, the heart's/ repetitive stress fractures, faulty logic, its stupid/ porchlight. "

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Migration

Snow is falling, snagging its points on frayed
surfaces. There's lightning over Lake Ontario, Erie.
In the great central cities, debt accumulates along baseboards
like hair. Many things were good
while they lasted. Long dance halls
of neighbourhoods under the trees,
the qualified fellow-feeling no less genuine for it.
West are silent frozen fields and wheels of wind.
In the north, frost is measured
in vertical feet, and you sleep sitting because it hurts
less. It's not winter for long. In April
shall the tax collector flower forth, and language
upend its papers looking for an entry adequate
to the sliced smell of budding
poplars. The sausage man will contrive
once more to block the sidewalk with his truck,
and though it's illegal to idle one's engine
for more than three minutes, every one of us will idle
like hell. After all that's happened. We're all
that's left. In fact, the Arctic tern will fly
12,500 miles to Antarctica as it did every year
you were alive. It navigates by the sun and stars.
It tracks earth's magnetic fields
sensitively as a compass needle and lives
on what it finds. I don't understand it either.

[Jessica Bebenek · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the skill in these poems is undeniable--obviously not something to bring on the subway. While I could appreciate the craft, I found myself not being able to emotionally connect to the poems a lot of the time. I will definitely be reading more of Solie's work, but I hope to connect with it further.
A truly great poet, regardless.

[Camrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just when I feel I'm zeroing in with Karen Solie on a terrific insight she shifts gears and the life mystery at hand remains illuminated but unsolved. Still I like her elegance and unusual angles, for example: on primeval ferns in New Brunswick ("cellular turnover is practically audible").

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Take this guy up ahead who's driven 45 minutes / with his turn signal on through this jurisdiction of few exits, / as if the hope of a left is all he's got now / in his one chance on this earth."

[Hong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some hauntingly beautiful lines in here. I’m excited by the different forms at play.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Synchronicity is a theme
science can't explain. Mutual
appreciation brought us
no closer. More like
we showed each other what we're
made of. The human brain,
three pounds soaking wet,
its attentions divided.
My attentions were divided.
Nevertheless, I saw what I saw.

- Pigeon

Don McKay, quoted on the back of the book, made the following remark about the poet: "Solie's poems remind me there's a wild, amoral joy at the centre of making metaphors." Indeed, what's remarkable about Solie (among other things) is her use of metaphor. In fact, it was her use of metaphor that I liked most about her previous collection, Modern and Normal. Poems like "The Vandal Confesses" with lines like "Clothed / in low-rent autobiographies we slouch toward eviction / like dying brickwork" left me wanting more.

Pigeon may not be the follow-up I wanted (Solie trades in her remarkable metaphors for less-than-remarkable similes) but it contains many satisfying passages nonetheless...

to tap the sweet gas where it lies like the side
our bread is buttered on.

- Tractor

*

scattered like headlines after a war

- Erie

*

while buses roar around the corner like enraged bison
on the tens until half past one a.m.

- Meditation on Seaforth

In spite of some consternation with the abundance of similes and lack of metaphors, the collection is still rich with the poet's characteristically clever lines...

Last night saw us
dragging through the clubs, their soggy
double-digit martinis and vocals that reek
of auto-tune, suspecting someone else's fun
was having us. [...]

- The World of Plants

*

I knew it was past noon the way
you just know, woke from a solid, unearned
12 hours to the room's silent
treatment, [...]

- The Cleaners

*

strategic negotiations pursuant to the project
of getting the fuck out of there, or making
the best of being stuck where you were.

- Listening to The Revelator

Solie's poetry is evocative of a time and place. The time is the present. The place is Canada. There are echoes of the past, but this is because the present will always be haunted by echoes of the past. To write the present any other way would be unfaithful to the nature of time (at least time as we perceive it)...

The ice cream stands, tourist
shops were mostly boarded over, a few

dopey dance clubs padlocked, flyers
for wet t-shirt contests and quarter shooters

scattered like headlines after a war
through what might be called downtown.

- Erie

*

There's lightning
over Lake Ontario, Erie. In the great central
cities, debt accumulates along baseboards
like hair. [...]

- Migration

*

The night before, the 24-hour streetcar
stopped to admit a group of women
freshly off shifts in the downtown core, who spoke
in multi-accented English of spuses
and children,...

- The Cleaner

*

Sleepless hour populated
by its nightly broadcast. Shouts
from the bad strip, traffic,
raccoons at the bins,...

- Beauty and Reality Are the Same

Although the most prominent vision of Canada is urban and contemporary, there is still an echo of the past, of the untamed Canadian wilderness and wildlife...

On the far shore, trees
in inestimable numbers grey as one
toward evening, sleep standing like horses
in thin smoke of the fires up at Minto.

- In New Brunswick

*

One of the houses in the abandoned
townsite wind blows through without stopping.

- Frontier County

*

A magpie flies into a pine tree, aggressively
rearranges its interior, then flaps off
like an action figure. [...]

- Parasitology

Solie also takes interest in Canadian politics, addressing directly or indirectly, comically or seriously, political concerns that have shaped the Canadian identity...

He reflects on the playoffs, the anthem sung by a sellout crowd
at Scotiabank Place, dead soldiers' faces scrolling through TV time-outs,

and starts to weep. Afterwards, he is simply starving.
The way a good cry can really make a person ravenous.

- The Prime Minister

*

No experience necessary. High school
not necessary.

- Four Factories

*

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

*

My industry fails me. The first person fails me
utterly, again and again, like a landlord.
Even the flakeboard plant rusting vividly
in coastal fog is more than the sum
of its glues and dodgy management.

- In New Brunswick

*

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....

- Parasitology

The longer poems, "Archive" and "Norway", present a snapshot of the past. The poems are still grounded in the present, with the past viewed as a photograph. In fact, the photograph or the photographer is physically present in the poem. Solie seems to be describing the photograph as much as she comments on the act of photograph, of recording the past...

All this is in the photograph. It is and it isn't.

- Archive

*

In a photograph,
cresting wave and painted rail before which the photographer
stood firm. At 25, she'd seen the ocean
for the last time. A train carried her into the Great Depression.

- Norway

On a side note, reading the first line of "Archive" (Though it appears in the photograph as fog, snow is falling in its fractal specifics straight down onto the city) reminded me of Margaret Atwood's "This Is a Photograph of Me" (It was taken some time ago. / At first it seems to be / a smeared / print: blurred lines and grey flecks / blended with the paper).

To a lesser extent, Solie presents a snapshot of the past in other poems, again acknowledging the presence of a camera, photograph, or photographer...

Simone Weil starves herself to death
again and again in London while the great mystery
appears to me as through a pinhole camera:...

- An Acolyte Reads The Cloud of Unknowing

Pigeon is filled with the same nostalgia that permeates her previous collections...

embracing, like partners in a vicious sport, we laughed with the rest,
senselessly, even as it threatened to expose the vacant hours we poured
our own lives into, that stood in for youth. I can't say we
were not happy in those days, though I didn't fully understand
what qualifies, and still don't. [...]

- Park Place

Something I like about Solie is the abruptness of her endings, giving every poem the self-assured authority of the last word on any subject...

All this is in the photograph. It is and it isn't.

- Archive

*

We knew it couldn't last, and then it didn't.

- Casa Mendoza

*

It seems I send my thoughts out to someone on a distant shore
who doesn't exist. It keeps me company.
There's no harm in it.

- Norway

*

A lake-effect snowstorm bypasses the ski hills,
knocks the power out of some innocent milltown.
The world chooses for us what we can't, or won't.

- An Acolyte Reads The Cloud of Unknowing

Or, as in the case of "Migration", a deliberate lack of self-assurance, an open ending...

It tracks the earth's magnetic fields
sensitively as a compass needle and lives
on what it finds. I don't understand it either.

- Migration

A couple of my favourite stanzas...

At night, atoms slow so you can walk between them
and find absence, like your old house,
where you left it. Enter, and it expands
to the size of a hotel. Its rooms
are your childhood, your work, your loves.
Everyone you know is there, all the furniture
candid, open to interpretation,
though nothing can be changed.

- Norway

*

In the fact of your absence,
you are in some ways here,
like a Beethoven sonata
or the value of x, the variable
when the outcome if unknown,
as always the outcome is unknown.

- X

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Karen Solie's poems have a voice that is a potent amalgam of emotions and perspectives. In that voice is the spiritual grit and respect for the natural world of someone raised on a farm. In it, too, is the cynical resilience of someone who has chosen to be an urban dweller, and who manages to celebrate what is harsh and quirky about that environment. It's all tempered with revelatory sensitivity and tenderness, often prompted by chance collisions of those natural and less natural worlds. "Migration" - movingly dedicated to her aunt when Solie read it at the Griffin Poetry Prize readings in Toronto in the spring of 2010 - is a standout.

[Alexis]

I liked the prairie details in this poem and the poem called "Four Factories" really engaged me. In many ways, I did feel that these poems were technically brilliant, but they didn't contain a lot of human emotion, which is what really gets to me when I'm reading poetry.

The sense of place and location was one of the strengths of this collection.

[Mary Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long prairie highways cross paths with the GTA in Solie's gorgeous, disciplined, surprising 3rd book of poetry. The past impinges on the present acutely as she plumbs the depths of luck and unluck in metred lines both regular and adventurous.

[Erin Bedford · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am in the middle of my life. I see it
as through a crowd, from a bad angle,
and the show continues." from In New Brunswick

[b · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s not really much I can say about this collection to communicate just how, I don’t know, how meticulous it is, and how full, and how not at all pretentious it is. It was a hard read, honestly. It took me a really long time. Because I never felt roaring momentum maybe? It was so controlled, but not in some grasping way, not in some spoiled way. It’s hard to say. I found myself bringing out the sticky notes to mark sections I loved and then finding a lot of connections, and then applying too many notes, some sort of Cthulian set of extant index limbs, anreal ruffle when you flip thru them. Solie’s work, like that of Rae Spoon, has always sort of ‘confirmed’ the prairies for me, and maybe it’s cheap to praise seeing Medicine Hat in a poem, or a CASE tractor (so many tractors actually, tho’ no Minneapolis Moline, which I thought may’ve been included for this sake of its satisfying sonic properties), but you know what, Solie brings such a suction to everything she corrals in a poem, she makes it all fit and stick, and I am so grateful for it, and I think it’s especially important to see it from someone who doesn’t foreground the urban as the only way of experiencing life (tho’ that’s in here too).

“Rats come out to sniff garbage blooms / in rat weather...”

“Is it true a rat can spring a latch”

“noise for a voice / and noise for a home, for whom all places are alike”

“Something that wants to be heard / is rolling away its rock”

“I have dissolved / like an aspirin in water watching a bee walk into / the foyer of a trumpet flower, in the momentary / solace of what has nothing to do with me”

[Kanwarpal Singh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solie's poetry is evocative of a time and place. Present will always be haunted by echoes of the past. To write the present any other way would be unfaithful to the nature of time.
In spite of some consternation with the abundance of similes and lack of metaphors, the collection is still rich with the poet's clever lines.
Solie's poems remind me there's a wild, moral joy at the centre of making metaphors. Her political allegory her interest in Canadian politics, addressing directly or indirectly, comically or seriously, political concerns that have shaped her Canadian identity.

While I could appreciate the artist, I found myself not being able to emotionally connect to the poems a lot of the time. I will definitely try to read more of Solie's work, hope to connect with it book in further works of the author

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to write a long review of this collection, talk about Solie's amazing metaphors, the way that her poems can be playful while devastating, the way that she makes you *feel* with all of your senses that you are there.

But really, what it comes down to is that after reading this and The Road In... I think that I have a new favorite poet. Holy wow, I love Karen Solie's writing (and I must have more - curse this virus that is stopping me from running out right now to buy another of her books.).

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

i would like to say i get what everyone means in their reviews of this, but i dont. solis has some brilliant lines and beautiful turns of phrase, but that's the only thing that calls out to me here. i did mark some good quotes, but unfortunately her poems don't make me feel much, and feeling is what i want when reading poetry.
3 stars because i see why people love it, but subjectively to me it's just...meh

[silas denver melvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe this deserves a 5... stunned with its unflashy excellence

[Ot · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will try her other books—apparently she’s one of this country’s greatest living—but I swear half of Canadian is just nature-heavy poems like these that have never piqued my curiosity.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely poetry collection. The mixture of themes, topics, and forms was fun and keeps you guessing what the next one will be about.

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solie is a Canadian poet from the Western Provinces who currently lives in Toronto. This is her third book of poetry and many think her best, winning the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2010.

The focus of Solie’s poems rests on a wide range of subjects and themes. She moves from descriptions of vast industrial wastelands dotted with factories and chemical plants, to the wide open spaces and massive tractors resting in farmer’s fields in Saskatchewan and then on to Canada’s wetlands. She transitions easily to dig into the fabric of life in the cities, where people wander in lives that seem to go nowhere, inhabiting sprawling concrete, asphalt and brick spaces.

Some of her poems express concern with the problems of technology and the havoc it has wrecked on the environment. She explores the scarred landscapes we have created with our vast superhighways and our skies cluttered with high rises. She mourns the ways we overuse our rivers and lakes and questioning whether there is a balanced ethical way to live.

There are other poems as well, including one about sampling herring in Norway. But one my favourites is the one titled “Girls”, about a high school reunion attended by a group of women and their husbands.

Solie’s language runs the full spectrum, at times literal and gritty and at other times intellectual and colloquial. She sometimes ends her poems abruptly, making them even more forceful.

I enjoy an occasional book of poetry.
I am fascinated by how much a poet can communicate with so few words and I enjoy the rhythm and the flow of words.
I did not always understand all the nuances of some of the poems I read, but I still enjoyed them.
This collection has a fitting title and a beautifully rendered cover.
Kudos to House of Anansai for its beautifully presentation.

[Margaryta · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the first time I've decided to drop a poetry book, this one at 47%, or at the very beginning of the third section in the book, so almost at the half-way point. I've read a few poetry books that I really felt disconnected with but still managed to push through and somehow finish them, although it took about a month, simply because I had little to no incentive to pick them up again. With this one, I only started it a day ago and got through half of it, but it felt like a smarter decision to simply drop it and not bother.

I don't remember feeling so bored from reading poetry. The main reason why I got through half of the book was because I stopped trying to dig up the meaning in the lines and simply kept reading poem after poem, hoping the next one will touch me, or the next one. I didn't have any of the lines jump out at me, nor stay in my mind. It felt bland and I was disinterested in what I was reading. The purpose got lost very quickly and although I kept reminding myself of the general topic for this collection, the very fact that I kept reminding myself was a big put-off. I didn't find any of the poems I read to be clever or something new or memorable. Maybe - perhaps even "most likely" - the reason is because I don't have too much interest in the subject of the poetry collection, or that Solie's poetic voice just isn't for me.

Either way, I feel it was much more merciful to drop this one then to plow through and spend more time and energy on a book I'm sure I woudln't enjoy, even if the other half was better than the first.

[Jim Puskas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry being very much a matter of personal taste, I have mixed feelings about this collection. Some of her meandering pieces such as "Pathology of the Senses" leave me completely disengaged. On the other end of the spectrum, she's among the best of contemporary poets at sardonic observation of the society we inhabit. That really comes to the fore in poems such as "Tractor" and "Medicine Hat Calgary One-Way"; the latter is a real gem.