In this series, A.E. Stallings, Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, will explore a contemporary poem from a new book or anthology or journal and explain what she admires about it. You can subscribe to the newsletter to receive each issue in your inbox. This issue explores Karen Solie’s “Meadowlark,” from Wellwater. The poem is reprinted with permission.
Show me a bird poem and I’ll show you an ars poetica. In Karen Solie’s tremendous new book, Wellwater, worthy of all the prizes (it was recently co-winner of the Forward Prize with Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Avidyā, and just won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in Canada), there are several. But I’m particularly drawn to “Meadowlark,” a mostly unrhymed sonnet, that seems to place itself somewhere between Shelley’s ethereal “blithe spirit,” and John Clare’s more grounded skylark.
The meadowlark, for one thing, is, like Solie (born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan), a native of North America, a songster of the prairie:
Meadowlark
Prayer in the throat of a nonbeliever
offered up to the absent hereafter,
his two long notes and descending warble
put him at the centre of things.
A partial method, he knows, is no method;
and when you are too weak for beauty’s
startlement, when you desire not silence
but the peace of vague and benign
neglect, at decibels audible over
the wind, radio, tires through gravel,
through the open driver’s window
his song is like arrows of pure math
straight into whatever the heart is,
its still unbroken land, its native grasses.
I would be hard put to come up with a living poet more sure-footed than Solie, in her handling of vowel music and consonance (the mumbling static of “decibels audible,” for instance). She seems effortlessly but unshowily well-versed in the tradition, whose presence is felt as a kind of confidence. For me, the “prayer” at the top of the poem brings to mind George Herbert’s “Prayer.” The “centre” of things makes me think of Yeats’s falcon and falconer. The tone of “A partial method, he knows, is no method” somehow reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s dithering sandpiper, a “student of Blake.”
The sonnet also works physically as a landscape, starting us high in the towering heavens in the octet, with the warble of the high-soaring bird, while the blank horizon line (itself perhaps an open driver’s-side window), brings us down to the human level of benign neglect, a car radio, tires on gravel. Finally, the lower sestet alights us on the “still unbroken land, its native grasses” of the heart, and the ground whereupon the eponymous bird builds its humble nest.
The poem flits in and out of iambic pentameter, landing on a solid pentameter line, a traditionally successful strategy. But there is also a gratifying sense of rhyme, that we’ve resolved on a tonic chord. “Native grasses” feels like a concluding chime with “heart is,” somehow as the result of the vowel in “math” (underscored by “land”) attracted into the last sound of “heart is,” a kind of rhyme constructed in the ear’s memory. I’ll call it a stealth rhyme, for lack of a better term to hand. It sneaks up on you, but it pounces all the same. The sonnet, with its chary acre, is often the site of staking a claim of territory. Here Solie takes the Romantic English bird poem and makes it full-fledged Canadian.
Solie also has something that I think all important poets have: a unique stance on the world. Larkin quipped that “deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” Solie’s purview is Canada’s wintry north, a hard-bitten blue-collar landscape of degraded ecology that somehow overlaps with Nature’s sublime majesty. In “Snowplow,” from the same book, Solie says “The plow is a child of the north/ like Romanticism,” before describing how the blade “at its superb angle” pushes before it “old snow with the new, garbage and beer cans/ blown from the bus stop.” Solie’s poetry does something similar, pushing everything before it at its superb angle, leaving us with beauty’s startlement.
aes
‘Meadowlark’ is from the collection Wellwater first published in the UK by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, in 2025. Reproduced by permission of Macmillan Publishers International Limited.
copyright © Karen Solie 2025
Upcoming events
Stallings is participating in several forthcoming events in Oxford, including:
The hosting of a conversation with Phoebe Giannisi & Brian Sneedon for an evening of Greek poetry and performance in translation (17 Nov 2025, 17:00, Taylor Institution, St Gile’s): https://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/events/2025/11/phoebe-giannisi-in-conversation-with-brian-sneeden-and-a-e-stallings
A poetry reading with the American poet Ernest Hilbert at St Edmund Hall (21 Nov 2025, 17:30, Old Dining Hall): https://www.everseradio.com/a-e-stallings-and-ernest-hilbert-read-at-oxford-university/
Her lecture, “Rhyme as Experiment/ Rhyme as Alchemy” (26 Nov 2025, 17:30, Examinations Schools): https://english.web.ox.ac.uk/event/professor-of-poetry-rhyme-as-experiment-rhyme-as-alchemy
