Shrew sounds of leaves,

bleeding at a pace the eye can’t hold.

As a child standing in willow kindle,

grasses the yellow of grandma’s dying

arms, watching geese harrow a sky made

more blue by the radiance of decay,

asking for a sign…

from ‘Wolverine Creek’

This book marks the UK début of Canadian poet Sheri Benning, featuring new poems alongside work previously published in Canada. Benning’s early work draws on her strongly felt connection to her native landscape, rural Saskatchewan. In poems that couple sinew and roots, blood and sap, skin and stone, Benning explores an ecology of affiliation between humans and the natural world. The poems are also alive to the quiet intimacies between father and daughter, mother and child, between siblings and between lovers. Benning’s later work travels further afield – to Russia, New Mexico, Scotland – but always the physical landscape is entwined with memory, the landscapes of the mind.