The Caiplie Caves
(Book)

A Canadian poet, born in Moose Jaw, with a clutch of prizes to her name, Solie has written profoundly about the Canadian hinterlands. This collection dwells in yet another sparsely populated, unforgiving landscape across the Atlantic on Scotland's coast in the county of Fife. This coastline is honeycombed with caves that were once home to hermits, among them Ethernan, a seventh-century Irish missionary. Drawing from a wide variety of sources, Solie ghostwrites poems in the saint's voice, though his voice is not that different from the other lonely speakers she channels; loneliness defines all their lives. Master of the sardonic sublime, Solie stretches her sentences along lines of uneven lengths, making a kind of sense only the most accomplished practitioners of free verse can make. She is as allusive as Paul Muldoon, yet, unlike Muldoon, she provides notes, and even her long poems are immediately comprehensible. When they are reread and lived with, they open, and beckon, like a labyrinth in which something is learned at every turn, at every dead end. Now, especially, as we are isolated from each other, when we cannot know what comes next but hope it will be better, Solie reminds us: "Experience teaches, but its lessons / may be useless."

In her fifth collection, Griffin Prize winner Solie (Pigeon) projects the consciousness of Ethernan, a legendary seventh-century monk who self-exiled to northern Scotland's Caiplie Caves in the hope that extreme isolation would help him decide whether to found a priory on nearby May Island or become a hermit. Poems conceived in Ethernan's meditative voice ("if one asks for a sign/ must one accept what's given?") alternate with the poet's own impressions of remote coastal life: its history, myths, and landscape ("sleepless/ fields staring skyward and the firth prowling the forest of itself,/ what's hidden as well as/ what hides it"). Drawing deeply from a broad array of historical accounts, philosophical works, and religious texts, Solie shapes an abstract geography of mind and spirit to the contours of physical space, where the smallest feature might assume metaphysical significance: "lichen's vow is to embody the composition of the universe/ less meaning than a way for meaning to emerge." VERDICT While this moodily erudite exploration of solitude exudes a timeless aura, most individual poems rarely transcend a claustrophobic flatness of expression, diluting "the nervous power of life" that potentially resides within their subjects. [See "Versifying," LJ 1/17/20.]--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

*Starred Review* A Canadian poet, born in Moose Jaw, with a clutch of prizes to her name, Solie has written profoundly about the Canadian hinterlands. This collection dwells in yet another sparsely populated, unforgiving landscape across the Atlantic on Scotland's coast in the county of Fife. This coastline is honeycombed with caves that were once home to hermits, among them Ethernan, a seventh-century Irish missionary. Drawing from a wide variety of sources, Solie ghostwrites poems in the saint's voice, though his voice is not that different from the other lonely speakers she channels; loneliness defines all their lives. Master of the sardonic sublime, Solie stretches her sentences along lines of uneven lengths, making a kind of sense only the most accomplished practitioners of free verse can make. She is as allusive as Paul Muldoon, yet, unlike Muldoon, she provides notes, and even her long poems are immediately comprehensible. When they are reread and lived with, they open, and beckon, like a labyrinth in which something is learned at every turn, at every dead end. Now, especially, as we are isolated from each other, when we cannot know what comes next but hope it will be better, Solie reminds us: "Experience teaches, but its lessons / may be useless." Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

In her fifth collection, Griffin Prize winner Solie (Pigeon) projects the consciousness of Ethernan, a legendary seventh-century monk who self-exiled to northern Scotland's Caiplie Caves in the hope that extreme isolation would help him decide whether to found a priory on nearby May Island or become a hermit. Poems conceived in Ethernan's meditative voice ("if one asks for a sign/ must one accept what's given?") alternate with the poet's own impressions of remote coastal life: its history, myths, and landscape ("sleepless/ fields staring skyward and the firth prowling the forest of itself,/ what's hidden as well as/ what hides it"). Drawing deeply from a broad array of historical accounts, philosophical works, and religious texts, Solie shapes an abstract geography of mind and spirit to the contours of physical space, where the smallest feature might assume metaphysical significance: "lichen's vow is to embody the composition of the universe/ less meaning than a way for meaning to emerge." VERDICT While this moodily erudite exploration of solitude exudes a timeless aura, most individual poems rarely transcend a claustrophobic flatness of expression, diluting "the nervous power of life" that potentially resides within their subjects. [See "Versifying," LJ 1/17/20.]—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY