Garden Physic

Sylvia Legris' 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' 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 phagomimicries and 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--springbeauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.