Thin Moon Psalm by Sheri Benning
Brick Books, 2007
Review by Amy Bronson
This new collection of poems, Thin Moon Psalm by Sheri Benning, contains hauntingly beautiful, lyrical accounts of daily life set primarily in the prairies of Canada, with occasional voyages into a Russian life with a lover and implied romantic turmoil. I received the book as I was preparing for a month-long trip to the east of this continent. It was a time when I was looking to turn to a poem like some would turn to the bible. How fateful, then, that the book to be carried religiously with me to each place on my travels should be titled after the psalms.
I first read Benning’s poetry at my home in the Albertan prairies. Benning is from the prairies of Saskatchewan and describes a similar environment and lifestyle that I or those I descend from have experienced. I initially found the poetry accurate, written with precision about the realities of rural life, but the narratives I found too subtle. The hollow feeling of a week I spent in a small Saskatchewan farmhouse in dead winter returned to me, chilling my bones, reminding me that October will end and
"Soon poplars will be pleading hands with nothing to hold," (p. 31)
Her description of the
"November sky: a mouth that
has smoked too much for years," (p. 15)
resonated with me, but it was still merely accurate and somewhat repetitive. I could not find her poetry accessible, though it is structurally gorgeous. There was not much to make me blush or change my politics, just well-written images of simple things I’d seen or smelled before.
I re-read the book once on my travels, taking it to a family cabin in the northern woods of Timmins, Ontario. Surrounded by a lake and loons and trees, there was relief in the sensation of the prairie homes that are so prominent in the book. Each observation Sheri Benning makes in her writing is made with the instincts of a farm girl, even in Russia. Everything is seen in relation to a connection with nature and I felt an exploration of what we carry from childhood in all we do. I made a list and a tally of the images, motifs or symbols that she uses in repetition, such as stones or the moon, the weather, birds, seasons, trees, fire, lighting, the heart, and blood. This repetition I thought previously bothersome became a brilliant poetic device. Images in the poetry are repetitive because nature is repetitive. Elements of each day are consistent; everyday is composed of the same substances--leaves and weather, the moon, light changes, the sweat of love, blood and the chill of what bloodlessness is. There is blood in everyone and there is blood in (almost) every poem. I discovered the brilliance of this work while secluded in the woods; a description like the following of a sterile concept like hysterectomy is so poignant when built out of pictures like
these:
"In the garden,
the poppy’s seed pod: cured skull,
my mother’s uterus full,
of dried bees," (p. 68)
But it remained only faintly exciting until I experienced this poetry as my perspective changed in the big cities I visited.
In Toronto and Montreal I was refreshed while reading poems connected with nature, but it was in the middle of last night, alone with a freshly broken heart, stopped over in Albany, NY in a room full of sleepy travelers on our way to Canada from New York City, that I found something in these poems that I haven’t found in any words before. It was just Benning’s words and I tunneling through amber and the scent of leaves; the grays of moonlit nights. It was inside embers of a fire or chasing something through the pinkish colours of my flesh. In my state of lonely exhaustion, post-weekend on an island with eight million other people, these poems connected me to what it actually means to be alive. The images became tangible and embedded in me with descriptions reminding me of the roots of my existence.
After a traveling month of reading these poems, ways I see my reality have changed through efforts I made to understand this book. I recommend this book so very highly because I found what I was looking for- an essence of my humanity that some find in religious works. Exploring the ethereal, honest world of Sheri Benning’s poetry is like climbing the skeletal structure of a great secret that cannot be fleshed in with words, only in the embrace of an exposed human heart, like this answer and this question in one of the many beautiful poems by the talented Sheri Benning:
"What can I give you? Funeral pyre of burning stubble, damp grass,
leaves, but then sweet smoke and ash, the rich, black earth of my heart," (p. 62)
****
I'm an 18-year-old southern Alberta girl who recently graduated high school from the Lethbridge Collegiate Institute. I'm taking a 'gap year' to travel and read all the books I've ever wanted to before hopefully attending the University of Guelph. I love poetry and have aspirations as a singer/songwriter.