Sh*t gets real
Karen Solie's The Caiplie Caves
If, like me, you surprise yourself sometimes with moments of shakes- and tears-inducing flashbacks when you see some lingering remnant of pandemic infrastructure in a grocery store (a ragged sticker on the floor marking six feet from the sticker in front of it, or a hanging panel of plexiglass at the checkout), then please undertake this exercise with caution. If you’re okay with it, though, then cast your mind back to the summer of 2020. The world had shut down three or four months earlier. Every day’s news included frightening death tolls and infection numbers. Zoom had dried our eyes and sucked our souls from us (I’m pretty sure they’re locked up in a vault from which precious drops each day are drawn to feed the demons masquerading as tech impresarios). By July, some of us had vacation time we had to use and a desperate need for a break. The fortunate among us also had someplace that we could get away to once we were allowed out of our houses. Packing for a week at a shared family beach house a couple hours’ drive from home, I brought along a poetry book I had bought shortly before lockdown but then not had a chance to read (after fourteen hours a day on Zoom, my eyes weren’t good for reading).
I was reminded of this book when I mentioned in the introduction to this newsletter that the poems of William Bronk had helped me through the first pandemic winter. The book that helped me heal during the first pandemic summer was Karen Solie’s The Caiplie Caves (2019). I will almost certainly write more about Solie’s work, most of which predates this volume, so let’s just be clear from the start that chronology is not something that we’ll worry about. I had read some of that other work before 2020 and I had liked a lot of what I’d read, but that’s all for another essay/post/letter.
Part of what made reading The Caiplie Caves so powerful that summer was the way its organizing conceit resonated with the situation in which I read it. The titular site is on the east coast of Scotland, near the village of Kilrenny. It is associated with Ethernan (who gives the village and its church his name), a Christian hermit of the seventh century who is said to have lived in the caves, enduring damp and cold, living on bread and water but otherwise, as Solie writes in her introduction, offering a “poverty of supernatural accomplishments.” The volume’s poems explore both the caves and their environs in the present and the imagined life of Ethernan, linking them in part through the concept of “white martyrdom.” As opposed to red martyrdom (“violent death resulting from religious persecution”) and the blue or green martyrdom of “self-denial and labour,” white martyrdom comprises ascetic withdrawal from the world. The contemporary speaker of some of the book’s poems is engaging in a withdrawal of sorts, its challenges and value amplified by its echoes of Ethernan’s sojourn in and around the caves (which other poems narrate and interpret). You can see how this might have felt apt to someone isolated in a small house in a coastal village after having been isolated in a larger house in a college town. At any rate, I certainly felt the aptness.
I felt, too, the power of attention carefully performed and limned. Whether ventriloquizing Ethernan or in propria persona, Solie is a crafter of lines whose sinuous music complements and complicates their sense. In “Crail Autumn,” Solie writes of a sojourn in “a stone village on a stone coast,” of solitude that “felt necessary, / though hardly a necessity, and so settled / the soot of the subjective over / everything.” Linger over those lines for a minute and notice their music, the assonance of “felt” and the repeated “necessary” continued through “subjective” and “everything,” the insistently sibilant alliteration throughout. Under this light linguistic pressure, the shore breaks “like the day, into simple shapes, / which are the most difficult / to explain.” The book shifts back and forth from poems set in the present, as the poet/speaker moves around and hunkers down near the caves, and a series of right-justified poems in the voice of the eremitic mystic. Ethernan’s sections focus on the challenges and rewards of privation. Here’s Ethernan meditating on “authentic sacrifice”:
I offer cold, the season working as it should
loneliness, love working as it should
pain, the body working as it should
and failure
And here, as the May Island haar (the fog typical of this coast) rests on his brow:
visual losses propagate in supersaturated air
what I can’t see, I can’t see myself in
I don’t mind it
some losses bring peace
But counterpointing the mystic’s askesis (giving things up) is the poet’s attention, which at once notices and generates sensory abundance. Solie augments that abundance with a richer array of aural effects. Watch and listen to sense dance with sound at and over the precipices of perfectly wrought line breaks in this amazing (in the literal, etymological, sense deriving from “maze”) sentence:
The scenery interprets us
and we are also the hyper-vigilant scenery
sanguine in our right to own the frontiers
in our photographs, drop
some payload, linger at neighbours’ windows
with trauma sensors all lit up,
to rat each other out
with the assistance of an airborne scrap
of the 21st-century unconscious
beside which the old machines of delivery appear
inefficient, comical, overlarge, like a Quaalude,
quaint as any former bond between
the watcher and the watched.
The contemporary speaker, with druggy similes and contemporary references (to cars and mines, space heaters and appliances, Silk Cuts and sleeping bags) is also armed with a wide range of allusions, many of which weave a loose seine or skein in which other ascetics and white martyrs are caught up. Her struggles with damp and loneliness connect to those of Ethernan partly through common habitation of this site, whose histories natural and otherwise inform a number of poems, and also through contemporary mystics whether in Scotland or Slab City, California. The collection’s broad temporal and spatial sweeps sweep into the same pile the Desert Fathers and the Big Book of Bill W., but always with an eye on what is seen when the objects of attention are somehow limited or circumscribed, on what we get by giving up.
In dividing this volume’s poems between the Ethernan ones and those voiced by a contemporary speaker, I have not done justice to the variety Solie achieves within each of these poles. While there is an overarching consistency to the mystic’s voice, Solie speaks the new in different voices, from arch ironizing of advertising discourse to the Latin nomenclature of the natural scientist. The book includes a handful of songs (titled “Song”), and an unannounced sonnet of sorts (“A Lesson”), impressive for the way it stretches that form’s conventions while maintaining a tenuous connection to its strictures. And, finally, among my favorites here is a subtle version or revision of the bog-standard analogical landscape poem (the “speaker goes for a walk” poem) that’s reminiscent of Frost’s “The Wood-Pile.” In “A Miscalculation,” the speaker ends up out after dark, not as one acquainted with the night but as one who didn’t mean to be there when the light failed. She follows a beacon, “a lamp post / at what I assumed was the golf course,” but this turns out to be “a misinterpretation pursued because now / / it is your life.” In the loss of the way and of the sense of proportion consequent on this “misinterpretation,” she has a realization as profound and un-reassuring as Frost’s “slow smokeless burning of decay”:
my body, not as old as when visible
became, not one with mind, but indistinguishable –
consciousness feeling with the blunt toe of its book
as its footprints fill with groundwater.
Perhaps one of Solie’s own titles captures this richness better than I have so far done, and so I’ll give her the last word: “To the Extent a Tradition Can Be Said to Be Developed; It Is More Accurate to Say It Can Be Clothed in Different Forms.”