Collective as well as individual mistakes haunt this poem, with its non-native plantings and its ritual childhood chores transformed by “our glyphosate on the wind, our malathion.” (Solie loves the strange music of toxic technical language.) Frackers arrive, “appearing before, as we said, we knew it.”
Into her tapestry of inference and association, Solie threads marvelous aphorisms. “Purity/is not a passive quality,” she writes in one poem. In another: “Money buys the knowledge it isn’t everything.” Yoking farm tools with literature: “The plow is a child of the north,/like Romanticism.”
Solie is aware of the pastoral pleasures of her poems — and knows how the sublime can jam up against colonialist realities:
Rolling hills
of bouldery glacial moraine,
hunting ground of the nomadic Gros Ventre,
Cree, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Lakota Sioux,
until settlement.
And how a legal document may direct us back toward terrible beauty when it decrees the sale of
… semi-arid acreage to immigrant farmers
and the land blew away without the grass to hold it down.
Solie is also a remarkable maker of similes. In “Autumn Day,” bourgeois coffeehouse delights undergo radical transformation:
the incense
of coffee and the vulgar muffins, overstuffed as geese
with funnels down their throats, truly the muffins of a culture on the brink
of steep decline.
This is funny — I wrote HA! in the margins. Solie here also relies on metaphor’s ability to hold together things vastly different in scale and nature, in order to pass judgment and expand the poem’s purview. But her knack for instilling poems with ethics never leads to hectoring, or even to preaching. Solie is thinky and sensory, serious and witty. No tendency cancels any other.
Jaded, curious, “Wellwater” also contains many notes of elegy, beginning with “Basement Suite,” a literal descent (in tercets if not in Dante’s terza rima) to a realm of “fixtures and appliances/repented of by the homeowners” and a catalog of pantry pests: “rice weevil, rose weevil, pea weevil.”