“There is a sense of things coming to one’s head”: Karen Soule, T. S. Eliot Prize Winner | hair

eAt the beginning of her latest collection, Canadian poet Karen Soule apologized: “I’m sorry, I can’t make this pretty.” This line appears in a poem called “Red Spring,” about agribusiness and its evil effect on humans: “The world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate, is advertised as unstable; but tell that to Dewayne Johnson // and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” In 2018, a jury ruled that Monsanto’s glyphosate weedkiller, Roundup, caused the former groundskeeper to develop cancer.

Sully’s admission — that true horror cannot be made up — recalls Noor Hindi’s 2020 viral poem “Damn Your Lecture on the Craft, My People Are Dying.” We can’t “treat poetry as something separate” from what’s going on around us, says Solly, speaking to me in Soho, London, the morning after she discovered she had won the TS Eliot Prize for her collection Drinkable Water. “We all have to keep our eyes open,” but “that doesn’t mean we can’t say we’re afraid, because it’s scary.”

The 59-year-old poet grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada, and now resides between Toronto and St Andrews, Scotland, where she teaches half-time at university. She began writing poetry in her early 30s, and published her first collection in 2001. Wellwater is her sixth collection, and was also joint winner of the Forward Prize last October.

Whether she’s writing about agrochemical monopolies, housing insecurity, or wildfires, Sully never once closes her eyes. While the question of the role of art in times of crisis is “a very old one,” the difference now “is that everything seems so accelerated,” Soule says. “There have been other times of crisis,” but now there is “a feeling that things are heading toward some sort of head.” “We have to feel like human beings with a soul to do anything about anything,” but there are interests that “thrive on us when we are dispersed and divided.” Art “is crucial, because it goes against that.”

Many of the poems in Wellwater focus on plants and animals. What quickly becomes clear is that Sully is fascinated by creatures we take for granted, as she puts it, “things that are so ubiquitous that they disappear into one’s landscape.” There are poems about climbing vines, mice, and “mash”—a Newfoundland term meaning swamp. “It’s very common, and that interests me,” Solly says. “To look back at some of these things and make them great again.” A large part of this transformation is humanisation: the grasses “pass little spoonfuls of silence” up the slope, and the sheep “find a plate // where they say / their terrified rosaries.”

Sully believes her compassion for nature’s neglected species “may have something to do with where I come from, which is a very beautiful place, but not in an overt way.” She grew up in a part of Saskatchewan where “there are no mountains” — “mostly fields and crops, quite flat,” but still “very beautiful.”

As a child, Sully was a big reader. She attended a small rural school with eight people in her class. “Her resources were not the best, but there were always books in the house – not poetry, but novels and short stories.” Her father, to whom she dedicated Wellwater, who died in 2024 before she completed the collection, owned a book called A World of Great Stories. “I read this a few times as a kid, though it has some things in it that aren’t exactly kid-friendly, and that’s where I really started.”

Sully did not enter the world of poetry until much later, when she was at university in her mid-twenties, after working as a reporter for several years. She studied at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, taking a course in contemporary poetry in her third year. The feeling she experienced with short stories — “the magic of reading a sentence, and it’s just a sentence, but it elicits this physical response” — she found in poetry as well.

“The whole crowd” she encountered in that first class – W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore – left a lasting impression. The writer who later “opened something open” to her was Thomas Tranströmer. Anne Carson was “always important.” And the work of young poets, including the two poets shortlisted for this year’s TS Eliot Prize, Isabel Pavey and Catherine Esther Cowie, was also “rejuvenated”.

Before Wellwater, Sully published five collections: Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road in Is Not the Same Road Out, and The Caiplie Caves, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2019. She taught for several years in the UK, at Manchester Metropolitan University before moving to St Andrews. Soule says the “financial cushion” provided by the T. S. Eliot Prize will make it possible to focus on writing. “And I’ll be a very happy person when I pay off my credit card and see the balance is zero, that’ll be great.”

She says that winning this award – one of the most prestigious poetry awards in the world – is “very encouraging.” As a writer, “You spend a lot of time alone, looking at a screen, thinking about all the ways you could make things better. There’s a lot of self-doubt—it has to be there, in order to produce anything good.” So learning about the book is “very nice.”

Regarding her practice, Sulli says she is not someone who can “write things down quickly.” “I’m a word-by-word kind of person,” she says. “Things take me a lot of time, and I’m very slow. So sometimes things evolve through many, many revisions.”

In Wellwater’s poems, among the poems about nature are other poems about urban spaces, malls, and bad apartments. In the opening poem, The Cellar Suite, Sully tells us: “In the cellar one is closer to God because / closer to the outcome, to creatures that no one loves / except the specialists.” In another essay, “The Good Toronto,” she wrote of “the browsing/baffling apartments we saw, advertised as ‘funky’ and ‘quirky’//were little illegal museums/we convinced ourselves they weren’t bad.” “The background to all of this is how affordable Toronto is,” says Soule. Many people have been pushed “into this series of temporary accommodations.” “It’s infuriating to see the direction many cities have taken,” she says, and it’s difficult to see a realistic path back.

Whether it’s environmental or personal, there’s “a lot of loss in the book,” Soule says. “But I also hope there’s some kind of gesture that transcends all of that.” The penultimate poem, Starcraft, written after her father’s death, gets at this, imagining “fragments of another world sliding in front of this one.” Or another dimension. I like it more. / … / … would mean / that you didn’t go, just outside the frame.”