Found
The Birds of British Columbia
From The Birds of British Columbia (4) Upland Game Birds.
Victoria British Columbia Provincial Museum, 1971
In no other game bird but the ruffled grouse do the tones
of gray, black, cinnamon and white shade and blend
with such quiet harmony. Child of the wilderness
that he is, in the full dark pupil of that eye surrounded
by an iris of October’s own brown, seem always to dwell
the brooding shadows of the great forest he loves
so well. And in the moulding of him Nature seems
to have embodied all the beauty, all the charm, all
the inexplicable strangeness and romance of the autumnal
woods and produced her feathered masterpiece. Always
is he the woodland’s pride, alert, instinct with life, and filled
with a spirit and a dash that furnishes, in such mixed cover
as we were hunting this day, the very climax
of shooting with the shotgun.
About this poem
The Scotland Canada Exchange 2006 – 2007, in partnership with Canada's poetry magazine Arc, features Scottish poets introducing the work of their favourite Canadians, and Canadian poets presenting the work of their chosen Scots.
John Glenday introduces Canadian poet Karen Solie:
I met Karen Solie and heard her read, and was impressed when I returned to Edmonton for a reunion of Writers in Residence in March 2006. She read in one of the newer buildings of the University – one wall a curve of windows and steady snow falling outside.
There was a hush both sides of the glass. She read well. Afterwards I bought her pamphlet The Shooter's Bible and discovered that her poems sound as good on the page as they read in the air, that they had weight as well as music. I went straight back and bought Modern and Normal, her latest collection.
Two poems caught my attention that first day: 'An Argument for Small Arms', in which Solie subtly conflates details of gunmanship and desire, and 'The Birds of British Columbia', a gem of a 'found' poem which I kept pondering and rereading for the rest of my stay in Canada.
I like the way she takes risks with her poems – the way she includes 'The Birds of British Columbia' and another six found poems in Modern and Normal, and it works:
'Describe the family of curves. Find the common eccentricity,
when the loci exist. Describe the family and find
the common eccentricity. Describe the family.
Show that the members of the family are pairs
of parallel lines. Show that a term cannot be introduced
into the equation by the rotation of axes.'
(from 'Invariants')
And it works, of course, because it works on different levels, with everything turning on the double meaning of 'axes'.
I like the way her poetry can be hopelessly learned, but doesn't shut us out: for example, mixing Xavier de Maistre's bizarre Journey around my Bedroom, Simone Weil, an old man with his Boston Terrier and Blaise Pascal all in one poem; a poem which kicks off with Heidegger's Abyss and ends in Baudrillard's America ('The Apartments'). I like the way she details the inhumanities that make us human, then counts herself in with the rest of humanity:
'An indigenous squirrel regards me squarely
from a branch. Cougars are culling local pets,
elk calve with murder in their eyes, and it's the worst
tick season in 40 years. The whole valley
is out for blood, for itself. As, of course, am I.'
(from 'Pastoral')
Her closeness to nature is obvious, but this is farm-nature; it's nature in the raw - there isn't a micron of sentimentality in there. Most of all, though, I like her poems because they are beautiful and say something to me that needs said.
Xavier de Maistre described the room around which he journeyed as 'that enchanted realm containing all the wealth and riches of the world'. Meaning, of course, the world of the imagination. Karen Solie's poems are certainly imaginative, they are bright and rich and dark and full of weathers, each one a little world closed in a little room. Step inside.
