Wittgenstein in denims, nuclear complexities

Those of us who live by poetry look forward, with a famished sort of envy, to a book by Karen Solie. Wellwater (Picador, £12.99; Tablet price £11.69) concerns itself, like all her work, with futile beauty, permeable temporariness, “a show of optimism and / of wry futility” before the chemicals and capital of modern life: the sliding of moments and universes through each other, changing seasons, memos missed, gaps between identities and objects, institutions, colours, names. Solie is a doubter, one who knows enough to know how little can be known; an industrious disconcerter; Wittgenstein in denims.

Solie may be the great philosopher-poet of the bewildered, de-wilded West. With a cool, salt and clear observational style reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop, she even pulls off scenes that would fit well in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. (“On Faith” begins with overgrown wells and ends with a memory of a cage fight.) Every poem is quotable. “Holiday at the Wave Pool” offers many sides of “the violently arbitrary / real”, including nature, which is “a place to enjoy without buying”. Elsewhere it is both encroaching and encroached upon. The cottonwoods in “Canopy” are “columns / of absolute nerve”, while “The Snowplow” is “a child of the north, like Romanticism”.

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