Forward Prize for Best Collection
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For the fourth and final in this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series, joint winners Vidyan Ravinthiran and Karen Solie discuss their collections, Avidya and Wellwater.
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Vidyan Ravinthiran: Reading your book, I felt that a lot of your poems were about a type of life under the surface, or lower down in the earth. You begin poems in basements and talk about the social lives of tiny organisms beneath the soil. Was this a conscious decision on your part?
Karen Solie: Ah, I hadn’t thought about that! I guess I have spent a fair portion of my life living in basements, so there’s that. I’m also the child of farmers, and on the farm so much of your attention is on what’s going on underground, and whether anything will emerge from the ground and at the right time. We all have these sources or wells of imagery, or preoccupations, and I suppose that’s one of mine.
Vidyan: Totally. I’m teaching an Elizabeth Bishop course at the moment, and my students keep asking me why is she choosing to repeat certain things from poem to poem; is it, as you say, a poet’s preoccupations? I definitely have my own that come back to me more or less uncontrollably, which I then have to turn into something basically legible that someone else might be interested in.
Karen: Yes, we all have them. I was reading your book yesterday, and in the context of the riots in London, and all of the propaganda and racist violence in the UK, it made me think about how often your book comes back to ideas of the ‘here and now’. I was thinking about this alongside the poems of yours that are paired. ‘The elephant’ being one of them, and ‘Trinco’, which foregrounds for me how your book invokes generational fear and trauma, in part a legacy of the violence in Sri Lanka that involved your own family. In the second poem, titled ‘The elephant’, there are the lines: ‘fear is a poison / taken daily / in tiny sips – by now inhumanly tolerant / it is the saliva you swallow without thinking’. And in the first of the poems titled ‘Trinco’, menace is everywhere in the imagery: the detail of the flower called firecracker, and the rumours of bodies buried in the garden, the biting insects, the garden hose like a snake and even the neighbour teetering on the step ladder. The notion of any separation between the ‘then and there’ and the ‘here and now’ is complicated in the book.
Vidyan: Thank you. I think in part it comes from having a very anxious family. And there are historical reasons for that which I talk about in the book. But we all have so many things entering into the sensorium at the moment: it’s hard to be mindful and present while also acknowledging that you’re a person in history, with the past alive and all around us. Your poems often begin in the present, and then delve into the past, not in a nostalgic but an analytical way where you insist that the two things are connected. For me and my poems, there is a very specific Sri Lankan Tamil situation, but I’m also curious about how any of us can remain in touch with both the present and the past.
I hope that as we get older, we do still have the capacity to be disabused of incorrect assumptions.
I was reading about a horrific, racist crime that happened to a young Sikh woman close to Birmingham, who was assaulted and told that she didn’t belong in this country. And so, I’m reading that, or I could be reading things about the Middle East or Sri Lanka or the US, and I have all these feelings about them, but then my six-year-old wants my attention, so it’s like, what do I do with those feelings? How do I translate them to the present? And my son is very aware of everything, so if there’s something on my mind or I’m distant, he knows. But I feel as though I can’t explain what it is that’s made me feel distant. So, I think maybe sometimes those feelings get put into a poem, or I hope they can emerge as a poem rather than as an angry opinion.
This reminds me of a particular poem of yours that I was thinking about yesterday when my son was telling me how he felt left out by other kids in the neighbourhood. I know we shouldn’t always read poems as relating directly to our own lives, but in particular situations it becomes very hard not to. And so I went back to your amazing poem, ‘That Which Was Learned in Youth Is Always Most Familiar’, which is so careful, so intelligently careful on this theme. Obviously, we can’t be like Wordsworth anymore and just say that children have an intuitive wisdom, but at the same time, sometimes children do come out with things that are true in a way you had forgotten, and you reveal this so well.
Karen: Yes, absolutely. Someone wrote about that poem that it demonstrates that my first instinct in that situation was to debate a small child, [laughs]! But in a way, that poem is about being proven wrong, and how that happens as you get older. I hope that as we get older, we do still have the capacity to be disabused of incorrect assumptions.
You mention Wordsworth, and one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, in addition to how important your book is, is how very beautiful it is. And as a word nerd, I want to talk to you about your lines, and the way you construct the line. Right from the get-go, the voice and the presence of another mind is so proximate in your poetry, and it has to do, I think, with your line. I was struck by the section yes from your poem ‘Orts’. You quote Hazlitt: ‘It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill.’ I can’t help but read that in the context of the essay The Indian Jugglers, but I did wonder about your relationship to difficulty, skill and beauty when you’re constructing the line. Even in terms of just the rhythm of the line.
Vidyan: Thank you! That’s a really good question. I find it really hard to let go of the poetic line. We’re having a bit of a prose moment in UK poetry currently, and sometimes poets who write lineated verse grumble about those who use prose in a sort of post-lyric way. I often really enjoy those kinds of poems, and end up in situations where I’m defending it, but in my own poetry, I find it so hard to think without lines…
On beauty: there’s that moment in your immensely ambitious poem, ‘Red Spring’, where you say: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful.’ You’re talking about these big agricultural corporations, and it interests me in two ways, because you’re not only commenting on the ugly nature of these corporations and what’s happening with the environment, but you’re also asking how could you make talking about that beautiful in a poem. And if you’re not making it beautiful, can you give it some kind of resonant shape, without turning a poem into a big info-dump. And that’s something you do so well in this collection, and in previous collections, too.
Karen: Yeah, the information dump issue is one that plagues me a little bit. How does one, even in terms of the syntax of a line, address the names of chemicals and companies and their effects, without sounding like some kind of dilettante research article or something? It was a real struggle. But I felt that was both a challenge and an opportunity to try to emphasise that there isn’t a separate realm where poetry belongs.
Vidyan: That’s something I really came to realise, and feel, reading your poems. I grew up in Leeds, an industrial city, and my wife often says to me that if I know the name of a flower or a bird, it’s only because I read it in a Seamus Heaney poem, [laughs]! Because that’s where my knowledge about nature has come from; a love for a nature that I haven’t actually experienced. I’m writing a paper about John Clare at the moment, and his specificity is incredible. Everywhere he looks, he just knows the name of this bird, and he knows exactly what this eggshell looks like, and so on. I definitely feel slightly alienated from nature, or least nature-writing, because of my upbringing – race is relevant – as are my experiences in school. It has taken me a long time to relate to flora and fauna in a different way.
We feel as though human environments and nature are different things, when we’re natural creatures, you know?
Another thing I wanted to ask you about was your poem ‘Las Cruces’ and Giovanni Maria de Agostini, which seemed to be speaking to a different kind of selfhood, or getting away from an assumed idea of the self. This, on second reading, was what I felt was the big connection between our two books. I feel very strongly that a kind of egoistic disgruntlement now feels so hard to avoid, and I was wondering if that was something you were thinking about in your poems.
Karen: Yes, definitely, but I do want to go back to your point about nature quickly. I do feel there is a separation between nature and culture that we have been conditioned to accept. We feel as though human environments and nature are different things, when we’re natural creatures, you know? We build our nests, and just because not everyone has the chance to go wild camping, it doesn’t mean we can’t connect with nature in a city park, or through the weeds growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. Nature has become a sort of wellness commodity now. Like, you go and pay for a forest bathing session and are meant to come back feeling great.
Vidyan: It’s like how you speak about having enough money to pay for a $9 loaf of artisanal, organic, ancient grain sourdough, which speaks to that commoditised experience of nature and authenticity.
Karen: Yeah, totally. And with Giovanni Maria de Agostini, I did swear that there would be no more hermits after my last book, but he came to me as a lockdown hermit, while I was staring at my basement suite wall. It’s compelling to me to have the kind of conviction of self he represents; that relationship with not only the natural world – I mean, he was in a cave on the side of a mountain concocting serums – but he also had a community that he developed around him on the strength of his conviction. I feel conflicted about it, because convictions in themselves are not always positive things. One can be convinced of very dumb things, but there is something compelling about having a strength of conviction that is sustaining.
Vidyan: It can be! My wife’s been working very hard on our garden recently, and there’s a lot more green space where we live at the moment. There are more woods and fields than where I grew up. So, I’ll continue trying to de-alienate myself from the natural world!
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Image credits: Neo Gilder
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2019 and for the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections in 2021. His third collection, Avidyā, was published by Bloodaxe in April 2025 and is shortlisted for the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He is co-editor with Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett of the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023). His memoir Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir, was published in January 2025 by Norton in the USA and by Icon in the UK. After teaching at the universities of Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham in the UK, he is now an Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard in the US.
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up on the family farm in southwest Saskatchewan. She teaches half-time for the University of St Andrews in Scotland and spends the rest of the year in Canada.
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