Two books of poetry today: not a surprising pairing, since Sheri Benning read from Field Requiem at the launch of Laurie D. Graham’s Fast Commute, and since both books share a concern with what we are losing in the Anthropocene, this sixth great extinction, caused by humans, that is happening alongside catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. Not a surprising pairing, either, since both books reflect the concerns of the book I’ve been writing or the past two years—except my work is nowhere near the polished power of the poetry in these books.
Field Requiem thinks about settler culture on the northern plains of North America: the Old World oppression and poverty that prompted people to try their luck in the New, and the way the culture and economy that was established here ended up being premised on destruction: of the grassland, of Indigenous lifeways, and then, finally, of that culture and economy itself, as decisions made far from here–to abandon the Crow Rate, to sell off the Canada Wheat Board–made the family farm more and more difficult to sustain. And, as the family farm has disappeared, it’s been replaced by a mode of corporate agribusiness that’s completely focused on the bottom line. On a recent trip outside Regina, I was surprised by the amount of aspen bush that’s been bulldozed to put a few more hectares into production. The creatures who depended on those scraps of woodland are now homeless, but their fate doesn’t enter into the economic calculations we use to measure success. I’m not putting myself outside of the economic system I’m describing, either; after all, my breakfast this morning included a slice of wheat toast, and our household income depends on the success of the agricultural economy in this province. Nevertheless, in the past 150 years, an economy based on grass/bison/fire/people that lasted for some 10,000 years has been replaced by one premised on continually expanding extraction, which might be taking us all past what the land, the ecosystem of which we are a part, can sustain. I think that’s the point of this book, which is deeply sympathetic to the people affected by these rapid economic and cultural changes while also being deeply sympathetic to the land and its more-than-human inhabitants as well. That sympathy is the root of the grief explored in Field Requiem.
Benning’s grief is prompted by the sale of the farm where she grew up; its loss is one of the things mourned by the requiem of the book’s title. The book is structured like a requiem mass; I understand that much, although I’m not Catholic and the Latin section titles are beyond the Latin I remember from high school. The specificity of Benning’s language astonishes me—her use of the word “ostinato” to describe the song of the meadowlark, for instance (36)—as does her deeply felt grief at the terrible cost of industrial agriculture:
Canola, pulse, cereal, flax, brushed nap of stubble,
GPS-tracked, factory-stamped seed rows,
clots of soil, dessicated scabs,
claw marks from heavy harrow
spreading last season’s trash—
straw, chaff. (67)
The land bleeds under the furrows, the “claw marks” left behind, the tearing out of woodlots “for forty more acres to seed next spring” (69). But these poems aren’t only mourning the loss of a culture, of the space for animals and birds that was left on the margins of fields, but human lives, too: friends, ancestors, family. And yet, despite the grief that suffuses this collection, the beauty of the language is somehow uplifting: despite the subject matter, my response to these poems isn’t gloom but admiration and recognition.
I’m not alone in my reaction to this book. In a review of Field Requiem, poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky describes the book as an expression of “[a] complex and multi-dimensional grief”:
grief for the loss of a family farm; appalled awareness of a heritage of complicity in the prosecution of the Dominion Land[s] Act, its violent theft and abuse of Indigenous territory; the mourning of exile; grief for the land itself, what was done to it in the first decades of colonial settlement; and, above all, horror at what is coming, what has already arrived: the colossal foreign-owned juggernaut of immense machines that gouge, seed, and strip the chemically poisoned soil for profit. (92)
“There is not a trace of sentimentality in these poems,” Zwicky continues; “the writing is exquisitely cadenced, and immensely enactive” (93). Indeed. Zwicky suggests that Field Requiem leads to a reconsideration of agriculture itself, since the Neolithic revolution that saw humans shift from hunting and gathering and farming, which she sees as having led, inexorably, to the ongoing sixth mass extinction (96). That mass extinction might be the legacy of the Anthropocene. Zwicky is convinced that’s the case; I can only hope she’s wrong.
Fast Commute has a different focus—the edges of cities, the highway arteries that feed Toronto, the verges of Edmonton’s Refinery Alley—but a similar sense of grief and loss, and a similar awareness of what our way of living is doing to our home. Unlike Field Requiem, Fast Commute is one long poem, motivated by Graham’s primary concern, as she states in an interview with Sarah Ens:
how to not be a blight upon this continent, upon this place I think of as my home. I’m trying to better understand the obliterating nature of the colonial project, and how or whether innateness might be possible for the non-Indigenous North American.
Field Requiem suggests a similar impulse, I think, but it is more interested in the lives of the settlers whose colonial project occasioned so many obliterations, whereas Fast Commute examines, without flinching, the obliteration itself:
The broad willow trunk. The weeping birch of childhood.
Towers piling up like a nightmare. Dense thickets
of monoculture. The railway, the roads, the walking trails
subverting natural north-south travel.
The bollards block the creek from view while we’re driving. (26)
That page ends with these lines: “A developer slaps his vinyl sign / on the side of a barn, his imagined new edge of a city” (26). So much in this poem reminds me of my experiences walking around the edges of Regina, the haphazard mess of development’s detritus, but also the life that somehow, against the odds, continues to, if not thrive, then survive in those bulldozed, stripped spaces. I’m not sure, though, that Graham’s work allows for my attempt at optimism:
Field of dead, waving goldenrod in an empty factory’s parking lot.
The curled tongues of failed sod. The sickness of soil along the road.
Fresh sidewalks and the way the road crew stares down at me like cattle:
concerned, vacant, mawing. (37)
But, like Field Requiem, Fast Commute isn’t necessarily gloomy. Its gaze is unwavering, its language incantatory, even if the world it conjures is dying, and to read this book requires a deep breath and intestinal fortitude. To have written it would’ve required those qualities in abundance.
It’s too late to add a discussion of these books to the exegesis that accompanies my creative nonfiction manuscript—that’s with my committee now, being critiqued—but I can certainly talk about them at the introduction to my defence in August, and I will. They model what I wanted to to, what I tried to do, what I hope I’ve done with some degree of success, in prose instead of poetry.
Works Cited
Benning, Sheri. Field Requiem, Carcanet, 2021.
Ens, Sarah. “Interview with Laurie D. Graham.” River Volta Review of Books, 1 April 2020, https://rivervoltareview.com/2020/04/01/interview-with-laurie-d-graham/.
Graham, Laurie D. Fast Commute, McClelland and Stewart, 2022.
Zwicky, Jan. “Last Things. Field Requiem, Sheri Benning.” The Fiddlehead, 291, 2022, pp. 92-96.
