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Short Haul Engine

by Karen Solie

Almost everything you need to know about Karen Solie’s first collection of poetry is contained in her title, Short Haul Engine. This slim volume of poems burns with the intensity of an engine, firing with white-hot visions of places and spaces we pass en route to the next short haul destination.

For much of the collection, Solie writes about landscapes – or rather about distances between the two landscapes she has known as home: the Saskatchewan farm where she grew up and the West Coast island where she now lives. What connects these two geographies, apart from the highways that cut across prairie and mountain, is the image of the engine: “slide shooters/and dozers shoved 92 miles of highway/through the Selkirks’ seismic muscle,/and now my four seizing cylinders/whine for a tail wind/to Saskatchewan.”

Solie’s work is driven by, well, driving – and not simply because so many of the poems are about the (f)act of driving itself. Solie’s poetic language is fueled by a desire to be on the move. In one of her few prose poems, “Flashpoint,” Solie connects this desire for constant motion to the need to avoid desire itself: “Transparent as sunlight, wind, fresh water through turbines, you know to keep moving, how resting in love’s fever of sugary leaves ferments a dark and elemental pool that ignites will to wanting.” Again and again, Solie reminds us that hers is a poetry that travels light, and travels often, to avoid entanglements with either places or people.

The language in this debut collection is spare and direct, blown clean of sentiment and nostalgia, like the prairie landscapes about which she writes. Perhaps it is partly because of her short, clean lines and simple forms that her poetry seems to drive toward a sense of vast, stark loneliness and restlessness that is, at the same time, beautiful: “How can I drop my bucket/racketing down a dry well and draw love/or God like cool water, up?/We met, that’s all./If coincidence has a law/it’s lonely.”

 

Reviewer: Heather Fitzgerald

Publisher: Brick Books

DETAILS

Price: $14

Page Count: 84 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-894078-17-9

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2001-10

Categories: Poetry