Synopsis
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize
Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
An Observer, Telegraph, TLS, Guardian, Scotsman, New Statesman, Financial Times and Irish Times Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize
Wellwater demonstrates a poet writing at the height of her powers. In poems that are supple, philosophical, bracingly honest and ribbed with erudition, Wellwater conducts a self-interrogative conversation with a culture in crisis and a natural world on the brink. Thresholds abound, ‘doors between dimensions’ where past selves or lost loved ones speak to us again: ‘death is not Saskatchewan’ shrugs one encountered soul, ‘we don’t all know each other in this place’.
Solie excels as a laureate of the transitory, of ‘baffling flats . . . tiny museums of illegalities’, motel rooms exuding a ‘low hum of menace’. Her roving, syntactically elegant poems will often resolve in disarming directness, a precise admission of the emotional stakes. Karen Solie is increasingly recognised as one of the essential voices in world poetry. Wellwater will delight those already in the know, while new readers of her work will be astonished.
'Solie is an essential writer . . . anyone remotely interested in 21st-century literature, or 21st-century life, should read her' – Tristram Fane Saunders, Telegraph
'Powerful, philosophical, intelligent . . . [Solie is] adept at pulling great wisdom from the ordinary' – Griffin Prize judges Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie and Carl Phillips
'A work of political profundity and linguistic dexterity that constantly surprises.' – Susannah Dickey, PEN Heaney Prize-winning author of ISDAL and Tennis Lessons
'Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken' – Michael Hofmann, LRB
'Half-expertise and half-magic . . . Wellwater is a terrifying book – and a masterly one. Solie is as good as poetry gets' – Declan Ryan, Telegraph
Details
24 April 2025
9781035048182Reviews
An essential writer: anyone remotely interested in 21st-century literature, or 21st-century life, should read her . . . Her writing swerves from gritty to sublime, philosophical to street-smart. Solie is not merely influenced by the great mid-century Americans; she is their equal – a modern great
An almost unreasonably wonderful book . . . Solie is a brilliant cartographer of the feckless and the careless, of the ways in which inhumanity has an impact on the minutiae of our daily lives . . . Half-expertise and half-magic . . . Solie is an exquisite phrasemaker, analogist, blender of idioms, aphorist – and all these overlapping gifts create images, phrases, whole poems that take your breath away . . . Wellwater is a terrifying book – and a masterly one. Solie, for me, is as good as poetry gets
Her expansive, talkative lines unpack tight domestic spaces jam-packed with childhood memories as well as the awesome vistas of vast, dust-filled Canadian landscapes. Sometimes didactic and anecdotal, always matter-of-fact, Solie is a philosophical conversationalist . . . This is a well-timed book addressing our moment of climatic turbulence
Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken
