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.

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