Field Requiem

By Sheri Benning

Field Requiem bears witness to the violence inherent in the shift to industrialised farming in prairie Canada. Sheri Benning's poems chart the ways in which a way of life collapses, the world of the family farm, even as the speaker suffers, too.The first poem in the collection, 'Winter Sleep', is a fever dream: the borders between past and present, between the unconscious and the real, break down. The poem reckons with the devastating social and environmental impacts of the agribusiness industry. The long elegy, 'Let Them Rest', takes its cue from the Dies Irae and the Latin liturgy of the Requiem mass to mourn Saskatchewan's many ruined farmsteads and razed communities. Throughout, the poems trace the still luminous contours of love for family, for the land in rendering the horrors of loss. The incantatory voice rises from dream into dark vision.The book also includes lyric poems that give voice to the affective consequences of loss brought on by climate change and factory farming and renew a sense of locality in the teeth of corporate farming practices. Benning has worked with her sister Heather Benning, who constructs large-scale, site specific installations which explore and extend these themes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800171527

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.

Book preview

Field Requiem

SHERI BENNING

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

All of it –

I

Winter Sleep

Plainsong

Minor Doxology

Extreme Unction

Intercession

Bury What’s Left

Compline

II

Slaughter

Nativity

Alms

Kelly Wiens

Pentecost

Vespers

III

Of, Rosalie

Ponteix, Saskatchewan: November, 1919

Of, Petronella

Ponteix, Saskatchewan: July 1929

Of, the baby

Of, Mathilde

Of, Amalia

Before

If she did not

Of, the swineherd

IV

Let Them Rest

V

Feast

Viaticum

Winter Sleep

To Glasgow

Notes

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also By Sheri Benning From Carcanet

Copyright

What’s coming

won’t be human if it has

no ghost.

– Jan Zwicky, ‘Depth’

FIELD REQUIEM

All of it –

the house in the village.

The house in the side of a hill.

The farm by Mariupol,

the farm by Mount Carmel,

Wolverine Creek, Bay Trail.

The abbey where we planted

a copse of blue spruce.

The blue spruce.

Pit dug. Fire lit. Ripe fields

pulse with light and shadow.

Clouds rush overhead.

Blessed is the field as it burns.

I

Exaudi orationem meam ~

WINTER SLEEP

Luke 19:11

Wheat threshed, casks of cherries, plums,

boiled melon, beef tallow, pig bladders blown

and tossed by children, mothers stirring stock,

kidneys, hearts pressed with aspic,

casings scraped and stuffed, allspice, cloves.

Fields bare, packed clay, porcelain sheen,

the long winter sleep. In my dream,

I wake and the village is empty,

coal smouldering, acacia shadows on snow.

Second sons, sow-thistle, the first to go.

In my dream, I wake to chaff and dust,

a war lost, harvest thrown down,

grain scattered on the temple floor.

In my dream, I wake hungry, an ocean away

in a hut hollowed out of the side of a hill, Black Sea

salt in my mouth. Wild onion, sage,

hawkweed, prickly rose, ploughed

dirt worked thin as smoke, poplar scrub

felled and bucked into windrows to make way for

electric blooms, Monsanto Roundup Ready Canola.

What we had wasn’t enough. Silk, balsam,

communal granaries full. We were told to take

what the master had given us and multiply it tenfold.

In my dream, I wake in the attic bedroom

of a mail-order farmhouse. 160 acres seeded

in barley and oats. A few brood hens, five head of cattle,

three-hitch binder, a trotter, two heavy horses. We were told

to take what we did not lay down, reap what we did not sow.

I wake to 6000 acres, high clearance sprayers

with 140-foot booms. Sulfur, phosphorus, nitrogen,

potash. Harvest done by drone. Yields downloaded

into $750 000 air seeders come spring. We were told –

to those who have, more will be given.

Viterra’s actuaries betting on futures markets,

brokering grain they don’t own. We were told

those with nothing, even that will be taken away.