Book Review: Grass, Sky, Song

Grass, Sky, Song
by Trevor Herriot
HarperCollins Canada (2009), 288 pp.

Trevor Herriot describes himself as an “urban refugee,” and while that may technically be true (he lives and works in Regina, and escapes when he can to a cabin outside the city), the author and broadcaster’s spiritual home is out on the grassland prairie of Saskatchewan’s northern plains. The human and natural history of that landscape, now all but entirely given over to agriculture, are the subjects of his previous two books. In Grass, Sky, Song, he focuses on the small number of grassland birds native to the region — Sprague’s pipit, the burrowing owl, the greater sage grouse — whose numbers are now in steep decline.

Informed by a deeply religious sensibility, Herriot’s account of the disfigured prairie is coloured by his abiding nostalgia for the pre-settler past, a time when wildfire and roaming herds of buffalo choreographed a “dancing mosaic of life” on the plains. Yet his openness to the transcendental (which he characterizes as “a hunger for ways of knowing that are worthy of this land” prevents him from solemnizing for too long over a fallen world.

Grass, Sky, Song is a moving testimony to a landscape in flux, and also a profound meditation on “wildness,” by the pre-eminent prairie naturalist of his generation. “Prairie people,” observes Herriot, “are accustomed to lost causes,” but one hopes the world he describes so vividly isn’t past saving.

More book reviews: Dr. James Maskalyk’s Six Months in Sudan