Description
"My emptiness will not be
frenetic with the friction
of my father's silences
but still as the unmarked graves
of his many forgotten selves"
—From "Salt"
A cycle of poems, Sleeping in Tall Grass takes an unsparing look at a painful, sometimes abusive, yet strangely redemptive family story enfolded within the body of the Canadian prairie itself—at once physical, historical, and metaphysical. These intensely personal poems reflect the complex relationships between sound and space, language and silence. Treating time as more layered than sequential, they reflect a process of organic composition distilled from Therrien's iterative observations and utterances. This is writing that reaches "into the very grain of existence"—a sonorous re-presentation of the human presence on the dispassionate but eternally giving plains.
Awards
- Short-listed, Alberta Book Awards, Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry 2017
- Short-listed, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes) 2017
Reviews
"It's a complex and multi-layered book, offering poems that are rooted in the prairie landscape, featuring a multitude of voices that speak to the familial, the historical, the philosophical and the mystical. Many of the poems are dark, weighted and at times exquisitely painful.... The personal stories he deconstructs show how the speaker submits, turns back to the land that begat him, until he sleeps in tall grass, until readers hear in 'Envoy,' the final poem, 'a voice singing of its own forgetting.'"
- Anne Sorbie
"'Sleeping in Tall Grass' is an outstanding first poetry collection.... In the opening long poem, 'Nowhere in Sight,' Therrien uses the physical experience of walking across the prairie as a metaphor for poetry while a walking rhythm sparks spiritual insight.... Sleeping in Tall Grass is a wise book, erudite and philosophical at times but foremost a spiritual and redemptive work." Volume 15, Issue 1 [Full review at http://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss1/17]
- Gillian Harding-Russell
"I appreciate Richard Therrien’s Sleeping in Tall Grass for its vulnerability, its intimate explorations of personal histories, family struggles, and the inevitability of both life and death. He offers vivid scenes, rich with feeling and emotional maturity, that give the reader powerful glimpses into the poet’s eye.... [H]is colourful treatment of the prairies captures sounds and sights with exactness; I could imagine Therrien in every scene, present on every page." Canadian Literature 234 (Autumn 2017) [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/lyric-intimacy-in-contemporary-canadian-poetry]
- Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten