Main content

Garden physic

Available Formats:

Details:

  • Author: Legris, Sylvia
    Date:
    Created
    2021
    Summary:

    "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.

    Subject(s): Canadian poetry
    Original Publisher: New York, New Directions, New York, New Directions
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9780811229913
    Collection(s)/Series: Saskatchewan Book Awards 2023