Modern and Normal

by Karen Solie

Evade your eye. Try to see as others do
what is desired or refused. What went wrong.
Or right, then wrong. Objectively, what hangs.
Pull yourself together. Years are neither kind
nor cruel. You drag on. The girl is gone.
Consider that it might be time to call in
a professional. Blood is fearless, runs
to meet a touch, indiscriminate, remembering
the first time it fell in love with the world, unaware
that now you are alone. From "Mirror" In Modern and Normal, Karen Solie takes her on-the-road fascination with being between places to a new level, exploring conceptual and perceptual states of in-betweenness - for example, between what is perceived and what is actually there, or between and among the patterns the world repeats from the cell to the structure of the universe -- to find points of intersection. Solie finds a middle ground between the discourses of the hard sciences and the intuitive, a realm of weird overlap wherein lie questions of probability, fate, determinism, chance, luck, and faith. She writes about fractals and physics, but also about bar bands, broken hearts, and the trappings of desire. Some splendid landscape poems celebrate nature while mourning the way in which it's often exploited and used. Once again Karen Solie offers readers her lovely dexterity and skill in poems which entertain as they move.

Genres: Poetry, Canada, School, Read For School, 21st Century

100 pages, Paperback

First published July 29, 2005

About the author

Prize-winning and internationally celebrated poet Karen Solie grew up on her family's farm in rural Saskatchewan. She was educated at the University of Lethbridge and the University of Victoria. She has taught English at the University of Victoria and poetry at the Banff Centre for the Arts Writing Studio. Solie has also served as writer-in-residence at universities and arts centres across the country, including the University of Alberta and the University of New Brunswick. Karen Solie is one of Canada's leading contemporary lyric poets.

Reviews

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

The modern in Modern and Normal is well observed in this collection; the normal is not. Solie blends the city with the country, the speed of our time running through her verses. I was totally absorbed.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another blog like review.

"Modern and Normal" is a really scientific collection of literature. The poems are dense and sometimes really hard to break through, but they are powerful, definitely not something for a light read. This was my biggest mistake in reading the collection.

Sometimes I got a bit stuck, wondering how the poems went together. Some screamed at me and others, I struggled to be captured by. I think this is one I need to read at another point in time, question titles, and individual words.

Some of the stand out poems I found within the collection include:

More or Less
-Cardio Room, Young Women's Christian Association
-Nice
-To Have and Have Not
-Untitled
-Three in the Afternoon
-Mirror
-Emergency Response

As If
-Self-Portrait in a Series of Professional Evaluations
-Science and the Single Girl
-Determinism
-Sleeping with Wittgenstein

Everything's Okay
-The Bench
-Pest Song.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know those books that would probably be mind-blowingly good if you hadn't read other books by that author/poet that you liked better? Yeah, that's this book for me.

It is really good. Dense in the best of ways, complex but somehow comfortable at the same time.... But it is not the book that I would pick to introduce someone to Solie's work.

One odd nitpick that bothered me that may be nothing to others: the paper. The stock that this is printed on is very thick and textured and that texture really bothered my eyes at points when I was reading it. That's a weird one - not something that has ever bothered me before, but I thought it was worth throwing out there to see if that has ever affected other readers.

[Andrea Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poems are observations and dispatches from life. They are stories and analysis of events, studies, and circumstances. This is the kind of work that I long to create with my own writing. Karen Solie has made the ordinary, extraordinary. Here is an example of this poet's thought processes: "Before words mathematics nested in the Kananaskis
Valley, calculations of upsweep and plain an ache
in the bones of crow and Cooper's hawk." from a piece entitled Parabola (p.44)

"Initially,an unbecoming enthusiasm
for dissection. What's dead
is dead and some unborn
will stay that way. All things find purpose
in the end, even the done-for,
done in." from Science and The Single Girl (p.48)

There is symbolic and emotional complexity brought to the simplest ideas of life. Where science and poetry meet that is where I believe you find Karen Solie's work in all of it's brilliance.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's noon, hot, and you're wondering how you hoped
to find peace in a place that doesn't want you.

—from "The Bench"

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The collection is divided into three parts: MORE OR LESS; AS IF; and EVERYTHING'S OKAY. Of the three parts, the first part, MORE OR LESS, contained my favourite poems. Perhaps my opinion is influenced by the excitement that accompanies discovering a new and remarkable poet. But it also seems to me that the poems in the second and third part don't have the same flare. They have flare, but not the same flare.

There seem to be a higher instance of - for want of a better term - one-liners in the first part. I enjoy these one-liners. The poet seems to have crystallized some attribute of the overall poem into this one line. Lines such as "Even covered in mud I look great" (Cardio Room, Young Women's Christian Association; pg. 17) or "Well, / I have to work, I say, and wouldn't it be nice / if someone made some money today?" (Nice; pg. 21) seem to encapsulate the poem; they seem to distill the essence of the poem, so that, in the event the rest of the lines were lost, they could accurately be preserved by this line alone.

Solie's descriptions of urban and rural setting are always evocative. Her sunlight "snickers" (Trust me; pg. 24). Her mountains are "broken by [their own] weight" (Parabola; pg 44).

Her descriptions overall left a strong impression. Her overall descriptive style is marked by its abstraction. Indeed, the expressionistic effect of these abstract descriptions have left the strongest impression of any poetry I've read in the past year...

Clothed / in low-rent autobiographies we slouch toward eviction / like dying brickwork.
- The Vandal Confesses (pg. 42)

Solie's poems are people with characters whose roles may be brief, but whose personalities are as full as were they drawn out across the pages of a short story or novel, rather than the fleeting lines of a poem. They are firmly rooted in their social and economic conditions, with the same universality as Raymond Carver's characters. They drink themselves "to tears / in the Milltown Union Bar" (Montana; pg 67). Her women "sing karaoke in a third floor flat" (Everything's Okay; pg 86).

A poem that stumped me was "The Apartments", focused (or unfocused) as it was on details of various writers and celebrities. I appreciated her references to Glenn Gould, Jean Beaudrillard, and especially Simone Weil; but otherwise I wasn't sure what to make of this poem...

Simone Weil asks of solitude, Where does its value lie?
It filled her up like rain until, the way a gauge is,
she was emptied.
(pg. 82)

My favourite poem, overall, may be "Untitled"...

You’re still young. Someone curled an arm around you as you slept,
and upon awaking gently touched your face. The first sound you heard

today was a bird, a note of origin, before traffic. It’s been years
since you thought the morning kind. Someone curled an arm around you

as you slept, and in the afternoon reached a hand toward you that you held,
simply. A note of origin, before traffic. Words you’d left behind rose

like birds to all they keep unto themselves. This is mine. Upon awaking
to that first sound, someone gently touched my face. This afternoon

I took his hand, simply, and reached across the words I’d left behind.
I’m still young. It’s been years since I thought the morning kind.
(pg. 26)

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of poetry! Solie does a wonderful job of capturing the atmosphere of the Canadian prairies. There is a sense of isolation and contemplation of the natural world, but also the need to hunt and kill—the viciousness of life. Aspects of contemporary life and industrialization encroach upon the wilderness of her poems, whether it's in the form of an airplane, Xanax, or a herbicide container mistaken for a rabbit. Her poems are so observant, almost scientifically so. The one thing that I disliked about this collection is the amount of found poems (there are six). I'm not saying that found poetry doesn't have its merits, and it's certainly one of the more fun forms to write, but most of the ones in this book are dull...I guess that's what happens when you use things like an analytical geometry text as your source.

"Science and the Single Girl"(well, the first part of it anyways) is one of those rare joys that made me stop and think: "Yes! This is why I read poetry." I've been feeling a bit of a poetry burn-out lately so I'm especially grateful for this marvelous piece of writing.

Poems that I liked:
"More Fun in the New World," "Nice," "Trust Me," "Untitled," "Science and the Single Girl" (first part), "Love Song of the Unreliable Narrator," "Under the Sun," "Thanksgiving," "The Bench," "Gopher," "Pest Song."

=10.25 /52 (19.7%) poems that I liked.

[Steph ✨]

hmmmm this is another case where I can see why this is considered technically good and effective, but it didn't work for me. quite often the meaning behind the imagery used feels just out of grasp for me, and pretty disjointed. There's a middle amount of poems in this book that I find compelling and work for me, but not enough to justify the whole collection I feel like. And a lot of the poems have really cool individual lines, but it's hard to see how they fit together, or fit with the poem that they are in.

Still, I feel like there's stuff here that I didn't see. So I'll probably read this again one day, and there was enough in it that I did see to make it kinda cool.

[Liisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 - 5, so 4.5

The middle section, "As If", had many of my favourites.

"India opened zero and gods crawled out. Then everything else/ fell in. Became, in falling, infinitely lovely, lit/ with presence. Light in the still-life, spark in the field/ we angle toward, odd-numbered/ in wonky sorrow, sight-lined to the vanishing point/ with no end to speak of.
....
It has the tug of a hole about it,/ that hole, the mortal instant that fevers, shines,/then resumes its mileage hill to hill.
.....
Please/
tell me to shut up over and over. You drive./
I can't keep my eyes open.

[Julie Mannell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry book is incredible. It loses a star because the poems in the middle are weaker and tend to lag. Particularly poems like "Self-Portrait in a Series of Professional Evaluations" which centre around questions that impede the movement of the work. The poem "To Have and Have Not" is perfect and the strongest in the collection.

[Alif · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this in first year and honestly it felt like rupi kaur but whiter

[Teya Z · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too dense for my liking at times. The last section was my favourite.

[Margaryta · Rating 1 out of 5]

Solie's poetry is clearly not my cup of tea. I couldn't get through her collection "Pigeons", and I'm barely scraping through this one. It was much denser than the earlier collection, from what I remember, and the poems were more difficult to get through because of how wrought with images they were. There is some poetry that, though focusing on science, still manages to be fascinating and engaging to read. "A New Index for Predicting Catastrophe" by Madhur Anand and "Chaser" by Erin Knight are two good examples of this which I'd recommend. With this, I didn't get much out of the poems apart from a few moving lines here and there, which weren't enough to redeem the experience. Solie's style will surely find its audience, but I prefer poetry that has a distinct and moving voice that plays with the emotions, something that I didn't experience here.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

ENG140 Reading List. Nicely written poetry, but it didn't make me feel anything. To me, poetry should play with the heart :)