Wellwater, with which Karen Solie won both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes for 2025 and in which the poem “Lilac” is collected, having first appeared in the TLS in 2023, was described in the Guardian as “a blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm”. But although it is full of the kind of post-industrial horror from which few pastoral illusions emerge intact, Solie tells the truth in a voice described in the TLS as “calm” and “sibylline”. She might claim, in the poem “Red Spring”, not to know “how to make this beautiful”, but she manages to do exactly that – “so long as we can perceive the beauty of her sculptured phrasing”.
“Lilac” describes a portrait of a woman from an earlier, pre-climate-change age. She is sitting calmly, in profile, looking out of a “tall window” at “the branches of the yard lilacs”. But Solie is not a moralizing poet and refuses to turn the woman, or the age to which she belongs, into a sign of all we have lost. The only hint of symbolism is the lilacs at which the sitter is looking (and then only because they figure on the cover of the collection, their bare roots reaching, perhaps, for the water of which they are starved). For the rest – the browns in which the woman is dressed, the gloomy light, the clumsy finish of the painting itself – the poet refuses to feel sad, either for the sitter or herself. She makes no claim for either the woman as chorus or herself as seer, content to record her simply as one who was “briefly among the living”. It is up to the reader, who feels there is more at stake, here, to decide whether the signature the woman is “overwritten” with is that of the artist or of Solie herself.
Lilac
In the portrait she is in profile
in her chair against the tall window
in browns, she wore a lot of brown,
the light less light than an absence of brown
and the branches of the yard lilacs
without even their simple leaves. Winter then,
or early spring, or the lack
of an artistic capacity for leaves. How sad,
I thought. But why? In silhouette
her finer features are not visible. Yet the portraitist
spent on her, if not talent, at least the attention
that might acknowledge a person as briefly among the living
even when overwritten as she is here
with another’s signature, and the year.
KAREN SOLIE (2023)