Garden Physic
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A musical celebration of the garden, from chaff to grass, and all of its lowly weeds, herbs, and creatures
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her medieval-inspired sixth book, Legris (The Hideous Hidden) offers the reader a "physic" in its archaic sense, as remedies for ailments: "Sea urchin for ulcers./ Hedgehog for convulsions./ Sea horse with goose grease for baldness." The book's main section is modelled on the masterwork of first-century CE Greek surgeon Pedanius Dioscorides, whose De materia medica illustrated the pharmacological uses of hundreds of plants. Appendices, a bibliography, and an index complete this poetic volume, which is at once "a catalogue, a desire, a wish." Stylized patterns of meter, rhyme, and alliteration cast their spells: "Burn the bark, scrape the dust from the wood./ Bitter berries expel bitter wind./ Oil of juniper remedies viper bite./ Spirit of juniper restores sore sight." Legris wants the reader to see "A metrical line from plant to poet to the god of physicians." Addressing a beloved in the persona of Vita Sackville-West, she asks, "How to write about flowers without the nauseating sentimental phraseology? This smells good, that smells bad, my hands rank with manure. This at least is pure." Bookish gardeners will delight in this playful modern-day florilegium.
