Garden Physic
Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris, published by New Directions Publishing Corporation in 2021, is a collection of poetry that celebrates the joys of gardening. With 106 pages, this edition presents Legris’s unique exploration of the garden as both a physical space and a metaphorical body. The poems intertwine botanical imagery with personal reflections, creating a vivid tapestry that highlights the interconnectedness of nature and human experience.
Readers will find a rich engagement with themes of nature and the body throughout the collection. Legris’s work draws on a variety of influences, from historical figures like garden designer Vita Sackville-West to the medicinal insights of ancient pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides. The poems evoke a sense of vitality and healing, using language that reflects the beauty and complexity of the natural world. Garden Physic invites readers to immerse themselves in a landscape where words bloom like flowers, offering a fresh perspective on the art of gardening and its deeper meanings.
Official synopsis Publisher
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.
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