Review of Richard Therrien\u27s Sleeping in Tall Grass

Harding-Russell, Gillian Frances

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 15 | No. 1 Article 178-27-2016Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard TherrienGillian Frances Harding-RussellUniversity of SaskatchewanPart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeHarding-Russell, Gillian F.. "Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard Therrien." The Goose, vol. 15 , no. 1 , article 17, 2016,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss1/17.Seamless Language of Poetry  Sleeping in Tall Grass by RICHARD THERRIEN University of Alberta Press, 2016 $19.95  Reviewed by GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL   Sleeping in Tall Grass is an outstanding first poetry collection, seemingly the product of the poet's life experience: his French- Catholic background, living on the prairies, and his relationship with his mother, father, and brother. In “Water, Language, Faith,” (first published in The Alfred Gustav Press's chapbook series), Therrien quotes Guy Davenport that “the work of the poet is continuous / while other ways of telling are wildly discontinuous” (11), and certainly the writing in Sleeping in Tall Grass may be seen as a poetic shorthand that gets to the quick of experience in seamless poetic language whose emotional impact is simultaneous with its thought.  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:   Walking the prairie is telling the    poem  its cadence  rising matter-of-factly    from the swell and fall  of her great grass belly   sharp    prairie light peeling syllable   from syllable – telling the poem  is stopping the sun  the narrative   in telling never told... (3)  Therrien's lines are hauntingly melodic and philosophically beguiling. The repeated cadences “telling the” have an incantatory effect, and the poet's ability to locate an image that becomes the pivot for turning the narrative upside-down is uncanny: “Your heart is but a quiet place for the poor / wandering universe to rest its weary head” (3). Accordingly, the perspective is inverted so that we see the universe as the wanderer walking through the speaker's perception.  In the second long poem “Water, Language, Faith,” the twin motifs that water “finds its own level” and the French- Canadian saying “tu pers ta langue tu pers ta foi” are thematically interwoven to suggest the transformation of faith to a personal level of spiritual understanding even as water finds its own level. As in T.S. Eliot's “The Wasteland,” Therrien interpolates intricately woven poetic idiom with snippets of conversation, for example during the speaker's exchange with his mother who undergoes chemotherapy to make her better that ironically makes her more sick. She knows that she has an appointment with a particular doctor, but is unsure what it is for, and this blind acceptance of her fate extends to her family life and her relationship with her husband:   Your father doesn't like it when I ask    questions your father's  not bad when you're here   when    you come to visit  but as soon as he's alone with me     boy  You wouldn't believe it. (14)  In the disjunction between the speaker's father and mother, I am reminded of the pathos and irony in the tableau conjured by Eliot in “The Wasteland” in which the woman combs her hair into “fiery points” that “glow[ed] into words” and then were 1Harding-Russell: Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard TherrienPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016“still” as she ponders what the speaker is thinking. A similar wasteland of lacking communication ingrained in a human reality plagues Therrien's world.  In many ways, Sleeping in Tall Grass is a poetry collection about coming to terms with death and death's legacy: first, the speaker's mother's death and then his father's, echoed by his brother's death, all by cancer.    My emptiness will not be   frenetic with the friction  of my father's silences    but still in the unmarked graves  of his many forgotten selves. (6)  Although the speaker offers glimpses of his disappointment in his father and honestly presents his inability to appreciate what his father holds important, the book is ultimately about redemption in spite of a prodigal (or enlightened) son's judgements  about his father that may not include the whole man.   There is the poem, “Somewhere on the Carlton Trail, Saskatchewan 1963,” in which a small, homesick boy phones home collect and is chastised by his father for not writing a letter which would be cheaper (30), and then there is the young man's lack of understanding about why it is so important to his father that he buy a piece of land in “the middle of nowhere,” not even touching a lake or body of water (32).   To his father in “About a Mile from the Lake,” to have left “a piece of property / a cabin” was his “simple version of an afterlife / honouring a blood lineage” and a “clenched dream.” Insight, however, comes to the speaker as he views the dirt road cutting across the “riparian plain” whose waters feed a lake “a mile southwest of here” (32). From “I may never return to this place,” the speaker moves to the following insight about his father, his own mortality, and the transience of the dream that his father wishes to pass on to his son:    I may never again occupy   after all these years  the body   of my father's dream. (32)  In a moment of serendipity for the speaker, a deer “illuminated by the late afternoon slant of sun” angles into sight, followed by another deer and another, and his father's dream for an instant is brought to sparkling life in his son's eyes (32).  In the final long poem, “Heavenly Men,” Therrien presents a vision of mankind in an urban setting using a characteristically continuous poetic language that mixes an idiom of imagery supported with terse, often  cryptic lines of the vernacular. After introducing a tableau of an old man in the Bow Valley Square on Sixth avenue who picks up a discarded bus ticket that reminds him of something lost “at the track / half a continent away” (75), the poem's title line that “the city is filled with such heavenly men” (76) moves toward the scene of another such old man that echoes his own father's situation in his urban living quarters following his mother's death:    Later in his room—up two flights of    piss-reeking stairs  – a sink, a bed, a table – wolves will    come out  from behind the calendar – Stan's    Autobody – and above  the days of the week numbered    through December  the glossy picture finger-smudged –    on the edge 2The Goose, Vol. 15, No. 1 [2016], Art. 17https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss1/17 of a small emerald lake under a    canopy of cedars  the impossibly pale voluptuously    virgin madonna  is lifting her sky-blue skirt dipping     her foot  into the mist shrouded water. (76)  Here, the “virgin madonna” simultaneously evokes the Virgin Mary of Catholic faith, the Lady of the Lake of Arthurian legend, and something that embraces the sacred and profane as the virgin figure “voluptuously” lifts her “sky-blue skirt” to dip her foot into the “mist shrouded water.” In combination with the calendar picture of a lake, these emblems embody the dregs of his father's dream of a legacy and a life not lived in vain and pettiness (as might have been suggested in his relationship with his wife and his son). The speaker accordingly has fulfilled the promise set out in the first pages of the book to understand in his yearning “the unmarked graves / of [his father's] many forgotten selves” (6).  Sleeping in Tall Grass is a wise book, erudite and philosophical at times but foremost a spiritual and redemptive work. Such influences as Gwendolyn MacEwen (a verse of hers is used as an epigram) and T. S. Eliot who, as an idealist, also battled with faith and an imperfect society, may be seen in the often incantatory style and a tonally textured poetic shorthand that mixes imagery with snippets of the vernacular to reach meaning through language's faults and crannies, displacements and juxtapositions.  GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL is currently a freelance writer and editor working for a number of magazines, among them Event’s Reading Service. She received her B.A. Hon and M.A. from McGill (1976) and her Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan (1986). She has had three poetry collections and five chapbooks published. In 2015 she placed second for a sequence of poems in The Antigonish Review's Great Blue Heron, and a manuscript “Proud Men Do Not Listen” was short-listed for Exile’s  Gwendolyn MacEwen chapbook.  A chapbook Fox Love is coming out in The Alfred Gustav Press series in 2016.                    3Harding-Russell: Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard TherrienPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016

Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard Therrien

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 15 | No. 1 Article 17
8-27-2016
Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard Therrien
Gillian Frances Harding-Russell
University of Saskatchewan
Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America
Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose
This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante
de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez
scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Harding-Russell, Gillian F.. "Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard Therrien." The Goose, vol. 15 , no. 1 , article 17, 2016,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss1/17.
Seamless Language of Poetry 
 
Sleeping in Tall Grass by RICHARD 
THERRIEN 
University of Alberta Press, 2016 $19.95 
 
Reviewed by GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL 
 
 Sleeping in Tall Grass is an 
outstanding first poetry collection, 
seemingly the product of the poet's life 
experience: his French- Catholic 
background, living on the prairies, and his 
relationship with his mother, father, and 
brother. In “Water, Language, Faith,” (first 
published in The Alfred Gustav Press's 
chapbook series), Therrien quotes Guy 
Davenport that “the work of the poet is 
continuous / while other ways of telling are 
wildly discontinuous” (11), and certainly the 
writing in Sleeping in Tall Grass may be seen 
as a poetic shorthand that gets to the quick 
of experience in seamless poetic language 
whose emotional impact is simultaneous 
with its thought. 
 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: 
 
 Walking the prairie is telling the  
  poem 
 its cadence  rising matter-of-factly  
  from the swell and fall 
 of her great grass belly   sharp  
  prairie light peeling syllable  
 from syllable – telling the poem 
 is stopping the sun 
 the narrative  
 in telling never told... (3) 
 
Therrien's lines are hauntingly melodic and 
philosophically beguiling. The repeated 
cadences “telling the” have an incantatory 
effect, and the poet's ability to locate an 
image that becomes the pivot for turning 
the narrative upside-down is uncanny: 
“Your heart is but a quiet place for the poor 
/ wandering universe to rest its weary head” 
(3). Accordingly, the perspective is inverted 
so that we see the universe as the wanderer 
walking through the speaker's perception. 
 In the second long poem “Water, 
Language, Faith,” the twin motifs that water 
“finds its own level” and the French- 
Canadian saying “tu pers ta langue tu pers 
ta foi” are thematically interwoven to 
suggest the transformation of faith to a 
personal level of spiritual understanding 
even as water finds its own level. As in T.S. 
Eliot's “The Wasteland,” Therrien 
interpolates intricately woven poetic idiom 
with snippets of conversation, for example 
during the speaker's exchange with his 
mother who undergoes chemotherapy to 
make her better that ironically makes her 
more sick. She knows that she has an 
appointment with a particular doctor, but is 
unsure what it is for, and this blind 
acceptance of her fate extends to her family 
life and her relationship with her husband: 
 
 Your father doesn't like it when I ask  
  questions your father's 
 not bad when you're here   when  
  you come to visit 
 but as soon as he's alone with me   
  boy 
 You wouldn't believe it. (14) 
 
In the disjunction between the speaker's 
father and mother, I am reminded of the 
pathos and irony in the tableau conjured by 
Eliot in “The Wasteland” in which the 
woman combs her hair into “fiery points” 
that “glow[ed] into words” and then were 
1
Harding-Russell: Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard Therrien
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016
“still” as she ponders what the speaker is 
thinking. A similar wasteland of lacking 
communication ingrained in a human reality 
plagues Therrien's world. 
 In many ways, Sleeping in Tall Grass 
is a poetry collection about coming to terms 
with death and death's legacy: first, the 
speaker's mother's death and then his 
father's, echoed by his brother's death, all 
by cancer.  
 
 My emptiness will not be  
 frenetic with the friction 
 of my father's silences 
  
 but still in the unmarked graves 
 of his many forgotten selves. (6) 
 
Although the speaker offers glimpses 
of his disappointment in his father and 
honestly presents his inability to appreciate 
what his father holds important, the book is 
ultimately about redemption in spite of a 
prodigal (or enlightened) son's judgements  
about his father that may not include the 
whole man.  
 There is the poem, “Somewhere on 
the Carlton Trail, Saskatchewan 1963,” in 
which a small, homesick boy phones home 
collect and is chastised by his father for not 
writing a letter which would be cheaper 
(30), and then there is the young man's lack 
of understanding about why it is so 
important to his father that he buy a piece 
of land in “the middle of nowhere,” not 
even touching a lake or body of water (32).  
 To his father in “About a Mile from 
the Lake,” to have left “a piece of property / 
a cabin” was his “simple version of an 
afterlife / honouring a blood lineage” and a 
“clenched dream.” Insight, however, comes 
to the speaker as he views the dirt road 
cutting across the “riparian plain” whose 
waters feed a lake “a mile southwest of 
here” (32). From “I may never return to this 
place,” the speaker moves to the following 
insight about his father, his own mortality, 
and the transience of the dream that 
his father wishes to pass on to his son: 
  
 I may never again occupy 
  after all these years 
 the body   of my father's dream. (32) 
 
In a moment of serendipity for the speaker, 
a deer “illuminated by the late afternoon 
slant of sun” angles into sight, followed by 
another deer and another, and his father's 
dream for an instant is brought to sparkling 
life in his son's eyes (32). 
 In the final long poem, “Heavenly 
Men,” Therrien presents a vision of 
mankind in an urban setting using a 
characteristically continuous poetic 
language that mixes an idiom of imagery 
supported with terse, often  cryptic lines of 
the vernacular. After introducing a tableau 
of an old man in the Bow Valley Square on 
Sixth avenue who picks up a discarded bus 
ticket that reminds him of something lost 
“at the track / half a continent away” (75), 
the poem's title line that “the city is filled 
with such heavenly men” (76) moves 
toward the scene of another such old man 
that echoes his own father's situation in his 
urban living quarters following his mother's 
death:  
 
 Later in his room—up two flights of  
  piss-reeking stairs 
 – a sink, a bed, a table – wolves will  
  come out 
 from behind the calendar – Stan's  
  Autobody – and above 
 the days of the week numbered  
  through December 
 the glossy picture finger-smudged –  
  on the edge 
2
The Goose, Vol. 15, No. 1 [2016], Art. 17
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss1/17
 of a small emerald lake under a  
  canopy of cedars 
 the impossibly pale voluptuously  
  virgin madonna 
 is lifting her sky-blue skirt dipping   
  her foot 
 into the mist shrouded water. (76) 
 
Here, the “virgin madonna” simultaneously 
evokes the Virgin Mary of Catholic faith, the 
Lady of the Lake of Arthurian legend, and 
something that embraces the sacred and 
profane as the virgin figure “voluptuously” 
lifts her “sky-blue skirt” to dip her foot into 
the “mist shrouded water.” In combination 
with the calendar picture of a lake, these 
emblems embody the dregs of his father's 
dream of a legacy and a life not lived in vain 
and pettiness (as might have been 
suggested in his relationship with his wife 
and his son). The speaker accordingly has 
fulfilled the promise set out in the first 
pages of the book to understand in his 
yearning “the unmarked graves / of [his 
father's] many forgotten selves” (6). 
 Sleeping in Tall Grass is a wise book, 
erudite and philosophical at times but 
foremost a spiritual and redemptive work. 
Such influences as Gwendolyn MacEwen (a 
verse of hers is used as an epigram) and T. 
S. Eliot who, as an idealist, also battled with 
faith and an imperfect society, may be seen 
in the often incantatory style and a tonally 
textured poetic shorthand that mixes 
imagery with snippets of the vernacular to 
reach meaning through language's faults 
and crannies, displacements and 
juxtapositions. 
 
GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL is currently a 
freelance writer and editor working for a 
number of magazines, among them Event’s 
Reading Service. She received her B.A. Hon 
and M.A. from McGill (1976) and her Ph.D. 
from the University of Saskatchewan 
(1986). She has had three poetry collections 
and five chapbooks published. In 2015 she 
placed second for a sequence of poems in 
The Antigonish Review's Great Blue Heron, 
and a manuscript “Proud Men Do Not 
Listen” was short-listed for Exile’s  
Gwendolyn MacEwen chapbook.  A 
chapbook Fox Love is coming out in The 
Alfred Gustav Press series in 2016.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
  
 
  
  
 
 
3
Harding-Russell: Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard Therrien
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016


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Sleeping in Tall Grass by Richard Therrien

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