This Have-Not Province

One of poetry’s great pleasures is the associative feeling a body of work evokes in the mind of the reader. Oeuvres become little biomes of consciousness, replete with weather, local color, accomplices, acts of god, and the daily news. Particular words and effects signal that we are in some recognizable place, like creaking boards in a familiar room. It is perhaps another way of looking at poetry: the process of making images habitable. When reading the poet Karen Solie, I experience this in a remarkably vivid way. My personal Solie-verse is a pungent composite of associations: Trans-Canadian car rides, motel rooms, dead-end jobs, the rattle of prescription drugs, and beautiful, desolate bars. To read her work is to partake in the beleaguered freedom of the wanderer or lowlife, out of luck and money, but rarely short on perspective: “The honourable life / is like timing. One might not have the talent for it.”