London, ON: Brick Books, 2007
87 pp. $18.00
If the title of her first book of poems, Earth After Rain—winner of the Anne Scumigalski Poetry Prize (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and the Brenda MacDonald Riches First Book Award—is all suggestive, then one would suspect Benning to have a comfortable familiarity with the elements and the land. Having grown up on a farm in central Saskatchewan, Benning is certainly no stranger to Canadian soil. Her time spent in Fredericton and near the Rocky Mountains of Alberta (where she is presently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alberta) has provided the poet with a diversified perspective on and knowledge of the Canadian landscape. Benning has also spent time in Russia, an experience similarly reflected in Thin Moon Psalm. This varied, world experience provides the poet with a unique perspective on nature and land that serves her poems well.
In particular, Benning draws upon this experience to probe the extent to which nature can define the self, can shape the ego. Her poems question humanity's agency over the world, and ask whether or not certain impulses and emotions are beyond human control. This inquiry is keenly explored through Benning's recurring images of the body as landscape or the union of human body and nature. These appear in the "slow-blood hills" section of the titular poem "Thin Moon Psalm" and the poem "Mikiskaw," where anthropomorphic poplar trees are said to have "pleading hands with nothing to hold" in the winter time, a description echoed in the hands of the speaker's father which are "driftwood bones, hands, / a hollow grey, the colour left," for example. The poem "Tantramar" is the most explicit statement of this line of inquiry, as the speaker is irresistibly drawn to a former lover, as if nature were compelling her desire for this past love:
at night you'd lie down beside me;
my body's drift to yours like water, a drawn reflex.
In the morning I'd bring you tea; you'd tell me fine waves of words I murmured,
thin shine of my unfocused eyes. Crescent of iris through pleats of night,
moon in the tantramar of dream.
I thought that I was through with you.
But tonight, sitting by a man, slow static of his hand
in his beard, sound that ends in smoke, my body's drift to you
something I can't control. . . .
The speaker's body is likened to a river, whose current "drift[s]" to the lover "like water." His or her gaze, with eyes that are "Crescent[s] of iris through pleats of night," is pulled to the lover just as the moon pulls the earth and controls the tides. The body not only mirrors the world around the speaker, but also, through the poet's metaphorical gestures, it literally becomes the natural world; and in this state, the speaker loses agency over her body to natural forces beyond human control.
Benning's associational gestures between the human body and the natural world are neither capricious nor arbitrary: in fact, the poet consciously juxtaposes her "landscape poetry" with the Canadian cultural canon by invoking the icon of Canadian landscape painting: Tom Thomson. Benning's poem "Northern River" provides a full citation of Thomson's painting of the same title—one of his most famous works. The subsequent lines of the poem, however, do not focus on a visual description of the painting, but rather on the mysterious drowning of its painter in Canoe lake, Algonquin Park in 1917: "Night moved across you like a glacier and you woke here, bone-broken, far from where you thought you would be. If you could tie a string to your what-ifs, this is what they would weave—a hydra-nest of jackpine." Benning's images suggest that Thomson has been "painted out" by the glacier-like night sky and (inevitably) taken over by the nest of "jackpine"—title of his chef-d'oeuvre. While Thomson's paintings, including Northern River and The Jack Pine, have been noted for their absence of human life, Benning's poem, in contrast, places the human being and his life struggle front and centre. In this way, the poem offers a humanist model in response to the romantic landscape of Thomson and the Group of Seven painters that continues to dominate the national imagination.
As the human is so central to her verse, Benning's poems work to appeal to the human senses and faculties. A number of poems take sensation as their topic: for example, "What it Tastes Like (Frost)" and its complimentary poem "What it Tastes Like (Salt)," in which, the visual, olfactory, auditory, and tactile senses contain memory. In the poem "Hysterectomy," the speaker asks the reader to hear what it sounds like to lose a part of one's self, both figuratively and literally: ". . . I trace her / stretch marks, last sun // through bare birch, drifts of fallen / poppy petals at the garden's edge. / Geese knife the dusk sky, / their cries, rusted / hinges. Listen // winter is a door slowly closing" (68). The mother's loss (or alteration) of her female identity has an "objective correlative" (to borrow an Eliotian term), an image of the "Geese kni[ving] the dusk sky" and the sound of their cries like "rusted / hinges." We are asked to "Listen" to this sound closely, and compare it to the sound of a "door slowly closing": a metaphor for the end of the mother's reproductive faculties. Emotions evoked in listening to this sound (in the mind's ear so to speak)—a painful sound, that I find inspires cringing, and might also produce a deep sadness in others, for example—are meant to mimic the mother's feelings of loss, of this "closed door" on womanhood and the physical and emotional turmoil it provokes.
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