What I'm reading
at the moment - The
Caiplie Caves by Karen Solie (Picador)
In
her fifth collection, Canadian poet Karen Solie uses as a theme the Caiplie
Caves on the shore of the Firth of Forth in Scotland. In poems which flit
between modern times and her exploration of the area and the chaos between the
fall of Rome and the emergence of modern Europe, she contemplates life, grief,
confusion, faith, among the realities of war and power.
The
poems are written in Solie’s own voice and also in the voice of St Ethernan, the
seventh-century Irish missionary to Scotland who retreated to these caves to decide
whether to establish a priory on nearby May Island or pursue a life of solitude,
a choice between the active and the contemplative life.
One
of the many attractions and delights of the collection is the use it makes of
found material, early and modern Christian texts, natural history books, Hegel,
St Augustine, Barthes, even The
Invertebrate Fauna of the Firth of Forth, 1881, by George Leslie and
William A Herdman.
This
makes for a glorious mix of language and tone, with a refreshing breadth of vision
and reference. I saw Karen Solie read at the Cork International Poetry Festival a couple of years ago and was impressed.
from
The Desert Fathers
With
or without a bindle of crystal meth,
they
made their anchorage in Egypt’s
Wadi
El Natrun, or the dismantled
Marine
Corps training base of Slab City, California,
hard
skills in transition, taking losses
and
burning, if not with a sensible fire,
in
the pride of specialized knowledge.
Snakeman
relocates the red diamond rattlesnake
and
northern Mojave rattlesnake
from
residents’ trailers to his own to live
alongside
him with the scorpions and guard dogs;
it’s
tough to have riches and not love them.
St.
Anthony sold his land, gave the money to
the
poor, yet in his Outer Mountain sanctuary cried
I desire peace,
but these bad thoughts
will not leave
me.
It’s
interesting to compare a version of this poem published online in The Walrus with the version
published in the book – lots of changes in line breaks and some deletions.
I’m
particularly interested in her use of found material because my next
collection, to be published 2020 I hope will contain a number of “found” poems.
It can be difficult to know exactly how to attribute various borrowings. Solie
does this by the inclusion of comprehensive “Notes” at the back of the book. It
seems to works well and doesn’t break the flow of the text but I did find
myself checking now and then to see if a line or stanza were borrowed and from
where.
