| Author/Contributor(s): | Legris, Sylvia |
| Publisher: | New Directions Publishing Corporation |
| Date: | 11/02/2021 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
"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.