The Caiplie Caves

The award-winning poet Karen Solie’s striking new collection of poems blends the story of a seventh-century monk with contemporary themes of economic class, environmentalism, and solitude in an ever-connected world

if one asks for a sign
must one accept what’s given?

The Caiplie Caves, Karen Solie’s fifth collection of poems, explores the eastern coast of Scotland, situated among the fishing villages and coves in the county of Fife. At its center is Ethernan, an Irish missionary to Scotland who, in the seventh century, retreated to the Caiplie Caves to consider a life as a hermit. Here, Solie inhabits the mind of a man torn between establishing a priory on May Island and an existence of solitude, his uncertainty pulling him in seemingly contradictory directions.

Interwoven with the story of Ethernan are poems whose subjects orbit the physical location of the caves: the fall of a coal-fired power station; an “old man, who raises his spirit like a lamp, / collects Stella cans tossed from the raceway”; seabirds “frontloaded with military tech”; the dichotomous nature of the stinging nettle.

With a singular blend of wry and mythic tones, Solie makes the seventh century feel like recent memory and contemporary issues as disjointing as the distant past. These are meditations on the crisis of time and change, on class, power, and belief. Above all, these are ambitious and exhilarating poems from one of today’s most gifted poetic voices.