The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
Karen Solie, Griffin Poetry Prize 2010 Canadian Winner
Karen Solie’s first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, the ReLit and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second, Modern and Normal, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous North American journals. She is a native of Saskatchewan and now lives in Toronto.
Judges’ Citation
“‘If virtue is love ordered and controlled,/its wild enemy has made a home in me. And if/desire injures the spirit, I am afflicted,’ says Karen Solie in one of Pigeon‘s finest poems, ‘An Acolyte Reads The Cloud of Unknowing.’ It’s this particular affliction of desire – and the corrosive effects of human desire both upon ourselves and the world we inhabit – that Solie most often meditates upon in poems as humorous, often, as they are sobering. ‘Gone are the bad old good old days. Before us,/vast unfenced acres of decline,’ she says in ‘Prayers for the Sick.’ Solie forces us to look squarely at that decline, the landscapes we’ve ruined, the vistas we’ve cluttered, in service to a longing that, as she puts it, ‘hovers like billboards/over the expressway.’ The vision here is powerful, philosophical, intelligent, especially adept at pulling great wisdom from the ordinary – as when a tractor is found to manifest ‘fate, forged/like a pearl around the grit of centuries.’ It may be, as Solie suggests, that ‘the honourable life/is like timing. One might not have the talent for it.’ Among the greatest of Solie’s talents, evident throughout the poems of Pigeon, is an ability to see at once into and through our daily struggle, often thwarted by our very selves, toward something like an honourable life.”
Summary
Karen Solie launched to prominence with her first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine (2001), finalist for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and winner of many other awards and citations. She continued her upward trajectory with Modern and Normal (2005), and is now considered one of Canada’s best poets. Pigeon is yet another leap forward for this singer of existential bewilderment. These poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love and the eros of danger. Once again, Solie shows that her ear is impeccable, her poetic intelligence rare and razor-sharp.
Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.
Karen Solie reads Migration
Migration, by Karen Solie
Migration - for Cathy
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 fall, 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 the earth’s magnetic fields Sensitively as a compass needle and lives on what it finds. I don’t understand it either.
The following are links to other Web sites with information about poet Karen Solie. (Note: All links to external Web sites open in a new browser window.)
This collection is splendid in many ways, not least of which is that each poem conveys a memorable sense of place. It is that sense of place that sparked this intriguing essay by rob mclennan (http://www.openbooktoronto.com/articles/casa_mendoza ), inspired by the poem “Casa Mendoza”.
about 2 years ago
Just a lovely poem. I have trouble with a lot of post modernism but this I get.
about 2 years ago
This collection is splendid in many ways, not least of which is that each poem conveys a memorable sense of place. It is that sense of place that sparked this intriguing essay by rob mclennan (http://www.openbooktoronto.com/articles/casa_mendoza ), inspired by the poem “Casa Mendoza”.