The Landscape of Well-Being
May 21, 2026Reading time: 8 minutes
Wellwater Karen Solie
Slow Now with Clear Skies Julene T Weaver
Glasgoscopy Vicki Husband
The pandemic has provoked much thinking around the questions of health, community, and the environment, and I have been reading three poetry collections, dealing with them in different ways and from different perspectives. Julene T Weaver lives now in Seattle, having moved from New York. She is a psychotherapist and a herbalist, and has a long history of activism in the LGBTQ+ community. Vicki Husband is an occupational therapist with the NHS in Glasgow.
Karen Solie whose collection Wellwater won the 2025 TS Eliot prize lives between St Andrews in Scotland and Saskatchewan in Canada.
Karen Solie's perspective is shaped by her rural past as much as her current city living. Wellwater considers what we do to land, with our fantasies of development and productivity, our insistence that we can control and improve everything, including our own bodies. In The Grasslands, she talks about chemical pollution of groundwater, the damage of wildfires, the loss of biodiversity across the prairies.
the silvery, slender, rough
needle-leafed, wavy-leafed, cut-leaf, thyme-leafed.
wild, false, tufted and procumbent, fringed and nodding, the long-bracted, shaggy,
pleated, brittle, the creeping and the smooth,
panicled and pale, common
and endangered
We reintroduce species without understanding their context, the network of relationships, because we don’t understand our own.
Your solitude returned to you unopened
and unable now to see your own hand in front of you
you are actual size among your equals
ibid
We are only now coming to feel the grief for what we have done; we don’t yet even understand what we have lost.
Vicki Husband might. In Glasgoscopy she visited her patients during lockdown, driving through the quiet, almost abandoned streets of Glasgow to see quiet, almost abandoned people in their homes. The journey becomes multi-layered as throughout the book, the patient becomes the city, the city becomes the body, as medical professionals investigate, intrude, believe they are trying to cure.
A woman walks into a lobby, a hallway, a corridor ---
a woman walks into a room, aware that she can ---
a woman walks into a room as traffic, as blood -----
a woman walks into a policy, a crisis, a question ---
a woman walks into a room, within it is a person, and this is their city
A Woman Walks into a City
Descriptions of severe illness, incapacity, deprivation and loneliness are unvarnished
The tremor in P’s hands shakes ash onto the rug. Once or twice it threatens to catch light, until he stamps it out. He scolds his arm as if it were a child who never learns. The weight is falling off, the tremor eats up calories faster than he can take them on.
Room
but never without dignity, without respect for the resilience, the hope, the individuality of the patients – the one who brought his pigeons in to the house because the cooing helps him to sleep, the ones who insist ‘there’s worse aff than me’, those cherishing their dogs, the view from the windows, their homes full of memories. The languages of medical investigation are mirrored by these journeys, the progress of disease by the landscape of the stilled city. This book is a stunning, intense work of art, but the standout lines for me go beyond poetry
And the point of listening to the story, is the telling of the story,
And the point of telling the story is that someone has listened.
The Scope of Practice
Julene T Weaver writes like someone determined to move beyond the paralysis of the pandemic. She is a writer on a journey, through her own catastrophic illness, through the pandemic, from the farm of her childhood to the city, and from New York to Seattle. Her book is about re-establishing contacts, with the neighbours from whom her life has isolated her:
People like me aren’t expected
to ride a bus. To walk the lonely
streets. To meet those who provide the labor
that builds our cities.
Bus Stop in San Antonio AWP Off-site
She connects the fruit crops of her youth, now threatened by drought and higher temperatures in summer, to the crates of nectarines she buys at farmers’ markets and beyond them to the orchards burning in Gaza. She sees the collapse of social rituals and timetables as people tried to work out lockdown strategies, the protocols they devised for safety, the moment of holding the hand of a stranger in distress in the days of gathering anxiety immediately before lockdown. She resists despair
I’ll not go there with this new pandemic
I lived through one war, AIDS. -----
It’s time
for massive change before we proceed.
Slow now, with clear skies.
I’ve Lived Through One War
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