Garden Physic

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.