Böcker av Sylvia Legris

Praise for Sylvia Legris'Sylvia Legris's Garden Physic is the most refreshing book of the year. These are poems inspired by plants and flowers, but we are far from "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!". An apothecary and an alchemist, Legris shows us a dense and mysterious garden of verse, arranged in carefully cultivated harmonies: "Drip a drop in an ear to diminish an ache." Everyone should tiptoe in: there's nothing around quite like it'Graeme Richardson, The Times'Sylvia Legris's vegetal music has a sharp, cerebral edge that combines Gerard Manley Hopkins's radical, spellbinding rhythm and Marianne Moore's satirical wit . . . Sensuous, brainy and cardiovascular, Garden Physic is a cutting-edge ode to plants, teeming with human knowledge and natural mystery, accompanied by gem-like illustrations by the poet'Kit Fan, Guardian'Fizzing with ecological intent . . . An impressive achievement - one facilitated by the poet's singular, "wild-thoughted" vocabulary'Isabel Galleymore, Times Literary Supplement

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.