Thin Moon Psalm

By Sheri Benning

Winner of the 2007 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and the 2007 City of Saskatoon Prize and nominated for Book of the Year (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards

Fierce and delicate poems from a young poet reminiscent of Jane Hirshfield and Jan Zwicky

Rapt, musical, passionately engaged, the poems in Thin Moon Psalm move towards their own inner stillness, while also bearing witness to the power of relatedness -- to family, lovers, and the prairie landscape itself. Many of them are poems of remembrance and deep grieving, recalling in etched details the rigours and joys of life on a prairie farm, and those iconic moments which are alive with the unspoken -- moments between father and daughter, mother and child, sister and sister, lover and lover, poet and friend. Especially they take on the burden of what is lost, knowing "There is always a room we will never return to" and "we return only through loss: the place where we began."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2007
• ISBN: 9781771313254

Sheri Benning

Sheri Benning grew up on a small farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. She has since travelled widely while attaining several academic degrees. Benning is the author of two collections of poetry, Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books) and Earth After Rain (Thistledown Press), but this is her first collection to be published in the UK. Her poetry, essays and fiction have also appeared in numerous Canadian and British literary journals and anthologies, including New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011). Benning divides her time between Glasgow, where she completed her PhD, and her family’s farm near Manitou Lake, Saskatchewan.