Garden Physic - Softcover

Legris, Sylvia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811229904 ISBN 13: 9780811229906

Publisher: New Directions, 2021

Synopsis

A musical celebration of the garden, from chaff to grass, and all of its lowly weeds, herbs, and creatures

Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world’s most cherished pastimes: Gardening!
      “At the center of the garden the heart,” she writes, “Red as any rose. Pulsing / balloon vine. Love in a puff.” As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris’s poems map the garden as body and the body as garden―her words at home in the phytological and anatomical―like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky’s “80 Flowers.” In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation―spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.

About this title

About the Author

Sylvia Legris was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her collection Garden Physic was chosen as one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year by The (London) Times and CBC/Radio-Canada. Her other poetry collections include The Hideous Hidden, Pneumatic Antiphonal, and Nerve Squall, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811229904
• ISBN 13: 9780811229906
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112