Garden Physic (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780811229906)

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.

Author: Sylvia Legris
ISBN-10: 0811229904
ISBN-13: 9780811229906
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 11/02/2021
Pages: 112
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.20lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/21/2022