The Season's Vagrant Light

by Sheri Benning

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784101060
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	10/01/2015
Edition description:	None
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Sheri Benning grew up on a small farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. She’s since travelled widely while attaining several academic degrees. She published two books of poetry in Canada, Thin Moon Psalm and Earth After Rain. Her poetry, essays and fiction have also appeared in Canadian literary journals and anthologies. At work on new poems and a novel, Benning divides her time between Glasgow, Scotland, and a farm near Manitou Lake, Saskatchewan.

Table of Contents

From Earth After Rain

Why I'm Afraid to Have Children 9

Under the Noon Moon 10

Bear Letter #1 11

Bear Letter #2 11

Bodies of Stones 12

Blind 13

The Night was Split 13

That Ugly Thing 14

The World Open 15

My Body That Is For You 16

Impossible Endings 17

From Thin Moon Psalm

Listen 21

What It Tastes Like (Hoarfrost) 22

Filleting 23

What Passes Through 24

Womb 25

Torn Flesh 25

Sleeping Blue 27

October Light 28

Lastochka 29

Hymn 35

Bird Bones 37

Descent from the Cross 38

Thin Moon Psalm 39

Fidelity 42

What It Tastes Like (Salt) 43

Dance 44

Sing 45

November Light 45

Bones in the Wings 46

Womb 47

Northern River 48

Tantramar 49

Notes Towards a Love Poem 49

Unsent Letter #28 53

Nocturne 54

Wolverine Creek 55

Hysterectomy 56

Bread, Water 57

St Benedict's Rule 58

Legato 60

The Breath of Looking 62

Amber 63

Unsent Letter #47 63

That Song That Goes 64

Come 65

Ash, Smoke 66

Notes to Thin Moon Psalm 67

New Poems

Slaughter 71

Nativity 72

Rise When You Hear 74

Alms 75

Gone 76

Magnificat 78

Plainsong 80

Feast 81

Silence 82

Near the Saskatchewan River 83

Dusk 84

Night and the Silence 85

Mandatum Novum 86

Savannah Sparrow 87

Hopewell, New Brunswick 88

Spring Rain, Glasgow 89

Early Spring, Dancing 90

Ballast 91

Vigil 93

Acknowledgements 95

Editorial Reviews

"As a poet, Benning communicates feeling through words—and... she does so piercingly." —The Toronto Star


"It's that little bit of David Cronenberg or Guy Maddin about the work that we can admire. These poems are steeped in menses, fingernails, bones, flesh, tears, skull, uteri, and prairie soil. The sensuality feels sticky, sepia-toned, as if poked through a membrane." —Elizabeth Bachinsky, Event

From the Publisher