TS Eliot Prize Winner Karen Solie on Poetry in Existential Times
Canadian poet Karen Solie has captured one of literature's most prestigious awards with her collection Wellwater, a work that confronts environmental degradation and personal loss with unflinching honesty. The TS Eliot prize recognises her powerful exploration of contemporary crises through verse.
Art's Role in Times of Crisis
Speaking from London's Soho district the morning after her victory, Solie reflected on poetry's essential function during turbulent periods. "We can't treat poetry like it's some kind of separate thing from what's going on around us," she emphasised. While acknowledging this question of art's purpose during crisis is ancient, Solie noted the current acceleration of global challenges creates "a sense of things careening towards some kind of head."
The poet believes artistic expression becomes particularly crucial when powerful interests "thrive on us being distracted and divided." Art counteracts this fragmentation, helping maintain our humanity and spirit necessary for meaningful action. "We all have to keep our eyes open," Solie stated, "but that doesn't mean we can't say we're scared, because it's scary."
Wellwater: Landscapes in Distress
Solie's winning collection opens with an apology in the poem Red Spring: "I'm sorry, I can't make this beautiful." This admission acknowledges poetry's limitations when confronting genuine horror, particularly the devastating human impact of industrial agriculture. The poem references Dewayne Johnson's non-Hodgkin lymphoma, directly linking to the 2018 court ruling that Monsanto's glyphosate weedkiller caused the groundskeeper's cancer.
Throughout Wellwater, Solie maintains this unwavering gaze whether addressing agrochemical monopolies, housing insecurity, or climate-driven wildfires. Her approach recalls Noor Hindi's viral 2020 poem Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying, rejecting aesthetic detachment from urgent realities.
Finding the Remarkable in the Ordinary
Many poems in the collection centre on plants and animals typically overlooked in our daily landscapes. Solie expresses fascination with "things that are so ubiquitous as to disappear in one's landscape" - climbing vines, rats, and Newfoundland bogs called "the mash." Her poetic transformation often involves humanisation, with grasses "pass teaspoons of silence" up slopes and sheep finding "a nave in which to say their panicked rosaries."
This sympathy for nature's disregarded species stems partly from her Saskatchewan upbringing, where "there are no mountains" and the landscape consists mostly of fields and crops. "It's a place that is very beautiful, but not in an overt way," she explained, suggesting this background shaped her ability to find significance in seemingly ordinary environments.
Literary Journey and Creative Process
Solie's path to poetry followed an unconventional route. An avid childhood reader despite limited school resources, she discovered literature through her father's anthology A World of Great Stories, though she acknowledges "it contains some things that are not entirely appropriate for children." After working as a reporter for several years, she enrolled at the University of Lethbridge in her mid-twenties, where a contemporary poetry course introduced her to influential voices including WH Auden, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath.
The poet describes herself as "a word-by-word person" who works slowly through "many, many revisions." She discovered poetry offered the same magical quality she'd experienced with prose: "the magic of reading a sentence, and it's just a sentence, but it evokes this physical response." Later influences include Tomas Tranströmer, who "cracked something open" for her, and Anne Carson, who has "always been important."
Urban Landscapes and Housing Crisis
Interspersed with nature-focused poems are works examining urban environments, shopping malls, and inadequate housing. The opening poem Basement Suite observes that "In the basement one is closer to God because closer to consequence, to creatures no one loves but the specialists." Another poem, Toronto the Good, describes "The parade of baffling flats we viewed, advertised as 'funky,' 'quirky,' were tiny museums of illegality we convinced ourselves weren't bad."
Solie connects these observations to broader urban affordability crises, noting "the backdrop to all this is how unaffordable Toronto has become." Many residents face "this succession of temporary accommodations," a situation the poet finds "infuriating to see the direction that so many cities have gone." She expresses difficulty envisioning realistic solutions to this escalating problem.
Personal Loss and Looking Beyond
Wellwater navigates both environmental and personal grief, with Solie acknowledging "there's a lot of loss in the book." The collection is dedicated to her father, who died in 2024 before she completed the work. The penultimate poem Starcraft, written after his passing, imagines "compartments of another world sliding past this one. Or another dimension. I like that better. It would mean you aren't gone, just out of frame."
Despite the collection's sombre themes, Solie hopes readers find "some kind of gesture past all of that" within the poems. The TS Eliot prize recognition comes as particularly meaningful for a writer who acknowledges the solitary nature of creative work involves "a lot of self-doubt - there has to be, in order to produce anything good." The award provides both encouragement and practical support, with Solie noting the "financial cushion" will enable greater focus on writing while bringing the welcome prospect of "paying off my credit card and seeing that zero balance."
Now dividing her time between Toronto and St Andrews, Scotland, where she teaches part-time at the university, Solie continues her literary career that began with her first collection in 2001. Wellwater represents her sixth published work and follows her 2019 TS Eliot prize nomination for The Caiplie Caves. The collection also shared the Forward prize last October, establishing Solie as a significant voice in contemporary poetry who confronts our most pressing challenges without looking away.
