Carcanet Press - Sheri Benning

About
Reviews
Awards

Sheri Benning grew up on a farm in central Saskatchewan, Canada. She's the author of The Season's Vagrant Light (Carcanet Press), as well as Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books) and Earth After Rain (Thistledown Press) published in Canada. Her poems, essays and short stories have appeared in North American, British and European journals and anthologies, most recently The Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement and PN Review. Benning completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow and currently lives in Saskatchewan, where she teaches.

'...An exceptional book which commingles duty and love, herbs and elbow grease...Benning utilises the lyric's potential for time-travel, for resurrection, throughout the book, shoring up everything she can't bear to lose - or at least to accept is gone.'

Declan Ryan, Poetry Birmingham

'The poems themselves, in graceful free verse of acute imagery and sensual detail, create intimacy between reader and subject.'

Jean Van Loon, Arc Poetry

'In a voice both deeply embedded and far removed from a Saskatchewan prairie farm, a settler farm; Benning conveys deep respect and immense sadness for the fragility of the land, community, family, and individuals endangered by and lost to production, men, and reproduction, women. Benning's flawless lyric lines, and superb technical and emotional vocabulary strafe a reader's consciousness and challenge notions of progress invoking stark visions of degradation and disrespect. Aptly photographed abandoned homesteads precisely locate their settler coordinates and disperse nostalgia under the gathering cloud of the dark cover.'

Jurors, Pat Lowther Memorial Award

'Benning belongs to the next generation of writers-of-European-descent who are attempting to lift the truth of what happened on the Prairies in the late 19th and 20th centuries out from under the slur of "prairie anecdotalism" and into general public consciousness... There is not a trace of sentimentality in these poems; the writing is exquisitely cadenced, and intensely enactive.'

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, Poetry Review

'However urgent the political debate underlying these poems of grief and rage, loss and lyric yearning, Benning's skill is to elaborate these in most cases without overwhelming the poetry to didactic purpose, yet clearly delineating the sense of grief and outrage...'

Ken Evans, The High Window

'This is a stunningly beautiful collection [...] searingly wonderful poems of both lament and fury'

Beth McDonough, DURA Dundee

'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

'Like the Catholic requiem mass they often echo, her incantatory poems express both mourning and praise...her work is steeped in evocative sensory details'

Barb Carey, Toronto Star

'Sheri Benning's Field Requiem is a startling collection that is both hauntingly lyrical and politically engaged...the poems themselves stand like lines chipped into a headstone. Reading this book I felt I was tracing my hands over the marks made, trying to better understand what has gone before.'

Emma Simon, The Friday Poem

'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

Awards won by Sheri Benning Short-listed, 2023 The Saskatchewan Book Award (Poetry Book)
(Field Requiem) Short-listed, 2023 The Saskatchewan Book Award (City of Saskatoon)
(Field Requiem) Short-listed, 2022 The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry (Field Requiem) Short-listed, 2022 The Pat Lowther Memorial Award (Field Requiem)

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Sheri Benning Books by this author: Field Requiem The Season's Vagrant Light About Reviews Awards Sheri Benning grew up on a farm in central Saskatchewan, Canada. She's the author of The Season's Vagrant Light (Carcanet Press), as well as Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books) and Earth After Rain (Thistledown Press) published in Canada. Her poems, essays and short stories have appeared in North American, British and European journals and anthologies, most recently The Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement and PN Review. Benning completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow and currently lives in Saskatchewan, where she teaches. '...An exceptional book which commingles duty and love, herbs and elbow grease...Benning utilises the lyric's potential for time-travel, for resurrection, throughout the book, shoring up everything she can't bear to lose - or at least to accept is gone.' Declan Ryan, Poetry Birmingham 'The poems themselves, in graceful free verse of acute imagery and sensual detail, create intimacy between reader and subject.' Jean Van Loon, Arc Poetry 'In a voice both deeply embedded and far removed from a Saskatchewan prairie farm, a settler farm; Benning conveys deep respect and immense sadness for the fragility of the land, community, family, and individuals endangered by and lost to production, men, and reproduction, women. Benning's flawless lyric lines, and superb technical and emotional vocabulary strafe a reader's consciousness and challenge notions of progress invoking stark visions of degradation and disrespect. Aptly photographed abandoned homesteads precisely locate their settler coordinates and disperse nostalgia under the gathering cloud of the dark cover.' Jurors, Pat Lowther Memorial Award 'Benning belongs to the next generation of writers-of-European-descent who are attempting to lift the truth of what happened on the Prairies in the late 19th and 20th centuries out from under the slur of "prairie anecdotalism" and into general public consciousness... There is not a trace of sentimentality in these poems; the writing is exquisitely cadenced, and intensely enactive.' 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, Poetry Review 'However urgent the political debate underlying these poems of grief and rage, loss and lyric yearning, Benning's skill is to elaborate these in most cases without overwhelming the poetry to didactic purpose, yet clearly delineating the sense of grief and outrage...' Ken Evans, The High Window 'This is a stunningly beautiful collection [...] searingly wonderful poems of both lament and fury' Beth McDonough, DURA Dundee '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 'Like the Catholic requiem mass they often echo, her incantatory poems express both mourning and praise...her work is steeped in evocative sensory details' Barb Carey, Toronto Star 'Sheri Benning's Field Requiem is a startling collection that is both hauntingly lyrical and politically engaged...the poems themselves stand like lines chipped into a headstone. Reading this book I felt I was tracing my hands over the marks made, trying to better understand what has gone before.' Emma Simon, The Friday Poem '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 Awards won by Sheri Benning Short-listed, 2023 The Saskatchewan Book Award (Poetry Book) (Field Requiem) Short-listed, 2023 The Saskatchewan Book Award (City of Saskatoon) (Field Requiem) Short-listed, 2022 The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry (Field Requiem) Short-listed, 2022 The Pat Lowther Memorial Award (Field Requiem)	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog One Little Room: Peter McDonald read more Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati read more Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn read more Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry read more Billy 'Nibs' Buckshot: John Gallas read more Emotional Support Horse: Claudine Toutoungi read more
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