Field Requiem

Wheat threshed, casks of cherries, plums,
boiled melons, beef tallow, pig bladders blown
and tossed by children, mothers stirring stock,
kidneys, hearts pressed with aspic […]

The opening poem of Sheri Benning’s fourth collection, Field Requiem, begins with this list, tenderly sustained yet unsentimental, that demonstrates her masterful evocation of a place: the plains of Saskatchewan, Western Canada. There the smaller family farms, like her parents’, that began as settlements in the nineteenth century have given way to massive corporate acreage “paved / for agroindustry parking lots” and sprayed with poison to create the “[a]ntiseptic silence of canola / fields at dusk, muted.” 

With photos of dilapidated houses, a list of parish dead, and brief historical portraits, Field Requiem resembles an environmental art installation with the pathos of personal memorial, as it elegizes the loss of a way of life, “neck in the noose of profit margins.” Benning’s moving accounts of her parents’ afflictions and of those whose “former homes were forgotten” can read like the psalms she alludes to in her plangent, Bible-cadenced poems. The powerfully composed “Extreme Unction” tells the tale of seven brothers through an incantatory repetition of the phrase “He opens his eyes […],” each time spotlighting a different brother’s farmland death. The effect is bracing, epiphanic: 

          He opens his eyes

and he’s twenty-seven, pantleg caught
in the grain auger. […]

Benning is clear-eyed about the original settlements, “the cracked-open casket of the nation’s turn-of-the-century bullshit- / promises,” which displaced the Indigenous and Métis peoples, and about the settlers, often superstitious and cruel, whom she’s memorializing (the “pile of bones, sun-sucked skulls” on which a hunter stands). While its environmental critique is important, what makes this collection so exquisite is Benning’s precise evocations of a land where “all flesh is grass” and “[p]lace, in its mercy, holds all.”

These things I remember: the light
     in crested wheat, spear grass, meadow brome,
        the pasture’s first baize flush, late April.