The Caiplie Caves: Poems

by Karen Solie

Overview

The award-winning poet Karen Solie’s striking fifth collection of poetry blends the story of a seventh-century monk with contemporary themes of economic class, environmentalism, and solitude in an ever-connected world

if one asks for a sign
must one accept what’s given?

Ethernan, an Irish missionary in the seventh century, retreated to the Caiplie Caves on the eastern coast of Scotland to consider life as a hermit. In The Caiplie Caves, Karen Solie’s fifth collection of poems, short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, Solie inhabits a figure inspired by Ethernan, a man torn between the communal and the contemplative. His story is remarkable for the mysticism embedded in the ordinary; as Solie writes in her preface, Ethernan is not known for supernatural feats, but “is said to have survived for a very long time on bread and water.”

Interwoven with the voice of this figure are poems whose subjects orbit the physical location of the caves and join the sharply contemporary to the mythic past: the fall of a coal-fired power station; a “druid shouting astrology” outside a liquor store, putting “the Ambien in ambience”; seabirds “frontloaded with military tech”; the dichotomous nature of the stinging nettle.

These are meditations on the crisis of time and change, on class, power, and belief. Above all, these are ambitious and exhilarating poems from one of today’s most gifted poetic voices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374721350
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	346 KB

About the Author

Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up in southwest Saskatchewan, Canada. She is the author of poetry collections including Short Haul Engine, Pigeon, and The Living Option. Her work has won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Latner Poetry Prize, and the Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award. Solie has taught in writing programs and at universities across Canada and in the United Kingdom. An associate director for the Banff Centre's Writing Studio program, she lives in Toronto.
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Her collections include Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, and The Living Option. She has received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. The Living Option was named one of the best poetry books of 2013 by the National Post (Toronto) and The Independent (London). Solie lives in Toronto, Canada.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Preface
“In this foggy, dispute-ridden landscape”

I

The North
Sauchope Links Caravan Park
Crail Autumn
A Plenitude
NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W
Having abandoned his mission . . .
Efforts are made to dissuade him . . .
Evidence of his own cult in Pictland . . .
“Ethernan” likely derived from the Latin . . .
The Desert Fathers
“When Solitude Was a Problem, I Had No Solitude”
Tentsmuir Forest
A Miscalculation
The Spies
Mercenaries Know There’s Always Room for Specialists in the Market
The Meridian
Whose Deaths Were Recorded Officially as Casualties of “The Battle of May Island”
Song

I I

NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W
He remembers a friend . . .
Like Cormac Ua Liatháin, he sought . . .
Hostilities were inevitable among the four peoples . . .
Now blood on his lip . . .
Tomorrow, for sure, he will make a start . . .
A vision
He reexamines his practice
A visitation
He enquires of the silence
An Enthusiast
From The Invertebrate Fauna of the Firth of Forth, Part 2, 1881
The Shags, Whose Conservation Status Is “of Least Concern”
“Goodbye to Cockenzie Power Station, a Cathedral to Coal”
A Trawlerman
She Is Buried on the West Braes
White Strangers
Origin Story
Kentigern and the Robin
To the Extent a Tradition Can Be Said to Be Developed; It Is More Accurate to Say It Can Be Clothed in Different Forms
An Unexpected Encounter with He Who Has Been Left Alone to His Perils
A Retreat
Song

III

Song
A Lesson
The Intercessors
Crail Spring
The Sharing Economy
Time Away with the Error
Two Chapters on Ancient Stones
Ancient Remedies with Contemporary Applications Currently in Development
56.1833° N, 2.5667° W
The Isle of May lies just outside the western boundary . . .
Its paved road, which has all the appearance . . .
Having once dwelt at Caiplie, “place of horses” . . .
In a purposeful adoption of an ancient burial site . . .
You Can’t Go Back
Stinging Nettle Appreciation
The Hermits
Clarity

Notes
Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

"Karen Solie is the freshest poetic voice I've encountered in a long while . . . In a literary culture where complication is considered complicit, it’s good to have a poet who delights in taxing the intelligence. Solie operates on a wavelength different from that of any poet I’ve read." —William Logan, The New Criterion

"Griffin Poetry Prize winner Karen Solie is a genius for poetic explorations of the sprawling network that is modernity. The poems in this collection sacrifice no lyric in their pursuit of critique, and she freely quotes from Wittgenstein and Benjamin when looking at excruciating beauty and horror alike." —Todd Van Luling, Chicago Review of Books

"Karen Solie’s TS Eliot prize-shortlisted The Caiplie Caves is one of the more unusual poetry collections of recent years. It is many things at once: a vision of insular Celtic Christianity in its early medieval heyday; a juxtaposition of this with a more elliptic modern narrative; and a meditation on literary form, and how the modernist long poem might look through a contemporary lens . . . [T]his is a wilfully strange and unforgettable performance." —Aingeal Clare, The Guardian

"The competing instincts, in terrible times, of retreating from the world, or entering it ever more deeply, animate Karen Solie’s exquisite fifth collection." —John Freeman, Lit Hub

From the Publisher

07/01/2020

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

Library Journal