Garden Physic

Sylvia Legris'sGarden Physicis a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world's most cherished pastimes: Gardening!

At the centreof 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 gardenher 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 Physicengages 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 radiationspring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse. (From New Directions)

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Sylvia Legrisis a Saskatoon poet and author originally from Winnipeg. She has published several volumes of poetry, including The Hideous Hidden andNerve Squall whichwon the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize and Pat Lowther Award.