Short Haul Engine

From AwardAnnals

…Too delicate for these dog-days,
small, clover-blonde,
my sister sews indoors.
I ask her to fashion me
into something nice, ivory silk.
I am a big girl, sunburnt
skin like raw meat, sweating
two pews in front of the Blessed Virgin….
—from “Signs Taken for Wonders”

Reviews

Amazon.com

Short Haul Engine, Karen Solie’s first collection of poems, is eclectic in its interests but satisfyingly consistent in its polished, hoarse, sometimes slightly arch style. Solie’s wandering attention encompasses Robert Mitchum, the social function of the sturgeon, anatomy, Isaac Newton, and Anne Sexton, all while roving the towns, cities, and rural opennesses of western Canada. It is easy to emphasize the range of her book, but difficult to explain its satisfyingly constant compass. The beauty of Short Haul Engine lies in the restless tension between its lyricism and its constant attraction to the gruffly prosaic, in the way that Solie makes

An anaesthetist with an artist’s soul
thinks of skating
under a high white sun among glittering birches.
Midsummer, but his instruments
are icy as December railings, your body
a landscape in wintergreen

and

I would live to be
the kick in your perfect ass,
to see you shoeless and without sleeves
again in September, an autumn of men
falling around you.

happily coexist.

Solie’s poetry shares a great deal with the work of her contemporaries; writers like George Murray, Ken Babstock, and Paul Vermeersch convey a similar sense of localism, of guarded confessionalism, and of the poem as a meditative narrative. Solie continues and expands their explorations of Canadian consciousness, not as a derivative follower but as a peer. —Jack Illingworth