The Season's Vagrant Light

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.

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

Author Biography

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.