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.
