Short Haul Engine

by Karen Solie

Karen Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it's hard to believe this is a first book. Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to all sorts of possibilities. Even at their most playful, these poems dive much deeper than initially expected. There's a remarkably dark sense of humour at work here, but tempered with a haunting vulnerability that makes even the sharpest lines tremble.

from "Signs Taken for Wonders" ... 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....

Genres: Poetry, Canada

84 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

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

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favourite lines in Solie's poems often highlight her use of metaphor and simile. Indeed, Solie's metaphors are among the best I have ever read...

[...] mom's pale eyelids
are cabbage moths, fluttering [...]
- Signs Taken for Wonders, pg. 15

Panic is a wire singing in air.
- Action at a Distance, pg. 20

[...] My head
is a drawer full of spoons.
- Hangover, pg. 30

[...] our bar tabs lengthen into parables
- Last Waltz, pg. 35

[...] grinding their teeth like matches, just
waiting to catch fire.
- Flashpoint, pg. 40

[...] Walls here
are made of luck and girls
walk into them.
- Alert Bay, Labour Day, pg. 44

Even when I cry for you
it sounds like singing.
- Toad, pg. 75

My favourite poems...

Gone is the name of muscles
along your spine, your hanging arms,
throat's hollow the hole at the centre
of that word.

When you substitute his name
for love it is to hold him
in your mouth awhile,
dissolving like a pill.

My face assaults
because it is not his.

How often will you say grief
before the sinking of that stone
is complete, its gravity,
at last, rest?

You have set yourself to this work
of mourning, are breathless
as if it were travel.

On the edge of your ruined bed
my weight restrains what wants only
to go home.
- Three for a Friend in Lieu of Some Help, I, pg. 27


I

It's nothing, really.

A sliver of glass
just under the skin.

One of many small things
that travel blood
to the heart.


II

It's not a question
of empathy. You know she fears
the slow leak that begins
a body's dispersal in death
and does not consider this easing
into cold a kindness. Forget
what you've read in Ladies' Home Journal.
Illness is not a pottery wheel
spinning saints from terminal clay.
Come down to it, she would prefer you
between those clinging sheets,
to hand off her curse of ceilings.


III

Retrovirus, misplaced gene,
ancestral monkey wrench. Of course -
that shiftless lot
in illfitting sepia woollens.
Too long off the main road.

Few could meet the camera's eye.

Wasn't there an aunt
of 31 stone? Rumoured asylums,
extended "vacations"? A cousin
who sold a kidney for a gambling debt?
Anger morphines through her goddamning
the frayed helix turning up
like a bad penny, turning up
snake eyes.


IV

Dreams are seldom visions.
Those voices come
from down the hall and trees in darkness
are still trees. Anything
that keeps us up at night\
becomes desire: a fond reminiscence
of branched lungs, fluttering
aortic arch. Radiation gossips
her body's private life. Black
tangled swells, somnambulist poppies
bloom with the natural violence
of a thing washed up on shore.
Doctor, doctor, voyageur:
her hear is a map without rivers.
Non-negotiable, secure.
- Panic in Four Parts, pg. 69-69

It is worth mentioning that in one of her poems, Solie combines references to two of my favourite Annes, Anne Carson and Anne Sexton...

"Now it rose up - the life she could have lived.
- Anne Carson

Slide her through the night slot. She's much better on paper. In life, an awful racket, clattering
with pills. Her daughters in their rooms
ticked quietly as clocks. Neither they nor the men
who took her out like a subscription had weight enough
to hold her. Sex, abortion, famous dead friends,
she was all the news that's fit to print, bent
and popular as a car wreck. Anthologize her, quick.
She gave us the slip. Turned sideways
one day in Boston and was gone.
- For Anne Sexton, on the Anniversary of Her Suicide, pg. 63

[kaelan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Above-average MFA-style Can lit, but still prosey, paraphrastic and often obfuscated by regional hints and allusions. (If you aren't familiar with Victoria, Canada, say, then do you really get the line: "I'm cucumber cool, a temperate zone dressed for success in this tourist town rising like a scone from the Pacific" [from "Flashpoint"]?)

Although at least the book bests the flowery endorsements that grace its back cover:

Karen Solie's work walks into you like a five-star drug, spite and grace in her voice, the voice of an engine running hot in a wind from the jerkwater reaches, the far sparkling hills.

Solie's language is blistered, contagious; a level-eyed, machine-age ecstasy, tempered by circumstance, where 'Lions lie with lambs in the rusted box of a half-ton.'

Favourite poem: "For the Short Haul."

[Bo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up when, while visiting a popular Victoria bookstore, I asked for a book recommendation for a regional woman poet.

Maybe not the poet for me; I wouldn't read some of her poems, the ones with titles like "Heart Attack Song" and "Waking Up in Surgery."

[Barbara McEwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars - the poems were mostly 3's or 4's for me. Solid, enjoyable, some great descriptions and turns of phrase but not mind blowing. Definitely 'Canadian' in both positive and negative ways.

[Debbie Hill]

Read this back in February 2014, over 10 years ago, when I wasn't rating books or writing reviews on Goodreads. This is my reminder to re-read the book as I do admire this poet's work.

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, "Short Haul Engine" was Karen Solie's first poetry collection. The voice in many of the poems is that of someone who is tough, self reliant but also lonely and wistful. (Phrases like "heart wagging its little tail" are surprising and touching.) The fresh attention to the mundane details of life - driving and engaging in other activities in a car, watching an in-flight movie, drinking shots - is at times almost startling.

From the poem Sturgeon:

On an afternoon mean as a hook we hauled him
up to his nightmare of us and laughed
at his ugliness, soft sucker mouth opening,
closing on air that must have felt like ground glass,
left him to die with disdain
for what we could not consume.
And when he began to heave and thrash over yards of rock
to the water's edge and, unbelievably, in,
we couldn't hold him though we were teenaged
and bigger than everything. Could not contain
the old current he had for a mind, its pull,
and his body a muscle called river, called spawn.

[kathleen C. Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing in their images and comparison,words that reflect the life we lead in this swim of technology and politics. Karen relates us to a world alive with action and with selected words and images recreates the world supporting along in all its local regalia. Of all the very contemporary posts I have read, solid stands out as the bridge between the pAst ,using the current world as her mouthpiece. To question and reveal all at the same time
Worth your reading.

[David Moolten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gritty, driving work. The poems are short and accessible, close to the poet's own experience. These are small town poems, but the small towns are those with roadhouses, tough bars, cold terrain, and volatile, troubled lives.

[Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

While you can see some of her later work in glimpses here, Solie works far better with a thematic tie, as Modern and Normal's strength shows.

[Shulamit "Shulie"]

Solie is in my top five poets list of all time. She is the best new poet I`ve read in years and years, and this collection is superb. Read it! You won`t be disappointed.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautiful collection of poetry that was heart grippingly good. It is a book I will definitely reread and I am so pleased to have heard of it and found it.