Sheri Benning
Poems from Field Requiem appeared in The Paris Review, PN Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Brick, Prairie Fire, The Manchester Review and Grain Magazine. Field Requiem was a finalist for The League of Canadian Poets' Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Sheri grew up on a farm in central Saskatchewan, Treaty 6 Territory. She completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow and currently lives in Saskatoon where she teaches.
Field Requiem
Carcanet Press
"Incantatory, rich with lived detail, Field Requiem's ceremony of naming resists the 'terrible forgetting' that's led Saskatchewan to a dangerous present and that threatens a bleaker future. Sheri Benning knows that love of place requires attention to all of it - to its history and to its dead, to sublimity and devastation, 'matted pasture grass / where a deer has lain' alongside Intercontinental Packers and the 'chemical burnoff after frost'. 'How strange', she writes, 'to find oneself at the end of it all'. This is a work of devotion, a lament and a prayer, an urgent, heartbroken, and beautiful book."
- Karen Solie
'The reason the death of the colonial experiment on the Prairies should focus our attention is what has killed it: mechanized greed on a scale that is almost unimaginable.'
- Jan Zwicky, The Fiddlehead
'These fierce precisions are underscored with a perfect eye for detail. This is a writer who has noted and weighed everything and understands its loss. Field Requiem is a passionate work.'
- George Szirtes, The Poetry Review
'Benning is sensitive to the warp of memory as well as its weft...There's grief here which belies Benning's beautiful syntax, but also the love that makes recuperation her project: it must be possible to remember everything.'
- Imogen Cassels, Times Literary Supplement
'While its environmental critique is important, what makes this collection so exquisite is Benning’s precise evocations of a land where "all flesh is grass" and "[p]lace, in its mercy, holds all.'"
- David Woo, Harriet Books
The Season's Vagrant Light:
New & Selected Poems
Carcanet Press
"These poems stop the heart and recharge the senses…They seem to be teaching language fresh tricks of reception to catch the quick of experience."
- Don McKay
"Empathy and compassion are intellectual nourishment in this work, which at the same time fiercely contemplates how we are, even when among others, our own relentless companions."
- Karen Solie
Thin Moon Psalm
Brick Books
“...Sheri Benning performs an uncanny trick: she uses words as a means of hearing as well as saying things. As we read her graceful generous poems we join with her in drinking the world in – its darkness and loveliness and nameless potencies.”
- John Steffler
“…[T]he prairie landscape and sky-world, the temporality of passionate human connection; the physicality of memory and grief are the deep streams of metaphor this book engages. Sheri Benning is a marvel of a poet.”
- Sharon Thesen
Earth After Rain
Thistledown Press
“This first book of poems shows striking sensitivity to the verve and resonance of words, with openness to sensual and exploratory language…”
- Erin Mouré
“Sheri Benning's poems are born alive on the page; they're surprising, fresh, evocative of prairie landscape and bursting with emotional intelligence. I feel both smarter and wiser after entering her world…”
- Susan Musgrave
Written & Produced by Sheri Benning
Videography by Heather Benning & edited by Chad Galloway