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.”

The great horned owl underfeather you found
suspended on brome teaches you about the near
imperceptibility of grief. About thinness.
How light, hardly snared by down,
filters through and changes just-so
and so grief wears you, makes
you its slight shadow.

From “The Breath of Looking”

Sheri Benning grew up on a small farm in central Saskatchewan and now lives in Saskatoon. She has also lived in St. Petersburg (Russia), Fredericton, and Edmonton. Her first book, Earth After Rain, won the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Prize (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and the Brenda MacDonald Riches First Book Award. An earlier version of Thin Moon Psalm won the 2004 Writers Federation of New Brunswick Alfred G. Bailey Prize for unpublished manuscripts.

‘In Thin Moon Psalm Sheri Benning performs an uncanny trick: she uses words as a means of hearing as well as saying things. As we read her graceful generous poems we join with her in drinking the world in – its darkness and loveliness and nameless potencies. ” — John Steffler