The Hideous Hidden

by Sylvia Legris

From the winner of the Griffin Prize, a richly lyrical collection of poems exploring the body’s minutiae In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy. Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci’s Anatomical Manuscripts , the dermatologist Robert Willan’s On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil , Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue. The Hideous Hidden boldly celebrates anatomy’s “Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals. / Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen.”

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published September 27, 2016

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Canadian poet Legris draws on Greek and Latin medical texts, medieval knowledge of anatomy, and (apparently) Baudelaire in these richly alliterative verses about the physical body and other manifestations of nature. I loved the unusual vocabulary and all the alliteration and internal rhymes, as in “Articulation Points”: “Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen. … An ode to the duodenum.” Later poems move on from anatomy to consider botany and entomology. I didn’t like these, or the poems set out in prose paragraphs, quite as much. Taken together, a lot of these felt overcomplicated linguistically – to the extent that they can start to sound like tongue twisters. Still, an interesting meeting of medicine and art.

[Lovely Day]

It felt like the author went to the dictionary, picked the most obscure words in the English language and tried to make poetry. Nothing made sense.

[Alex K · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times morbidly resplendent, at others viscerally vulgar, these poems entranced me. The subject matter is unique (can't say I ever expected to read six poems on the spleen), but the author's mastery of meter and alliteration glamours the often repugnant science of anatomy.
It is full of scientific and musical terminology, and the combination of the two is fascinating to read.
My favourite bit...

"Dark dialyzes day's deliriums.
(Desperate cases demand desperate doses.)
Diazepamic diatonic.
The chemically sung interval
between sleep and shortfall
(the short slip between
falling hypnagogic
off a cliff and falling
off a cliff). The shudder
awake, the crash."

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

1
The long incision. The incipient voyage from aortic arch to thoracic inlet. Small-particled is the corpuscled city. (Bustling opuscula.) A city of animal electricity. A lowing cycling mass. Calm the cowed heart. Still the browbeating heart. Cool the controversial hearthstone. Let the blade intervene where the divine intersects bovinity.


2
Pour wax into the gate of an ox's heart. Close the small doors of the heart via a template of hardened wax, a temple of vital gases, water with grass seed suspension, glass blown through a cast of calcined gypsum, plaster of Santo Spirito. Spiritous dissection, blood-sooty vapors, the dense dance of the Renaissance counts down a Galenic pulse. Musculo vivicare. Transit the venous. Bypass the arterial. Underscore the two-part cantus firmus in heat and motion.


(The fixed heart burns slow, spurns fervor.)
—"Studies of an Ox's Heart, c. 1511-13," Sylvia Legris

[Brae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the earlier poems I would rate five stars, some of the later I didn't like at all, hence: compromise. Overall I did like this, though. Literally visceral, an appeal to both botanicals and gore—all my favorite subjects of metaphor. Best read while sucking on a hunk of rare, leftover steak.

Favorites: "Articulation Points," "Fleshes," "Vitals," "Fleshes 3," "Coaguably," "Island of Prosections," "Capita Mortua," "The Lungs and Other Viscera, c. 1508," "Thymus 2," and the Spleens series.

[Nicolette ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A playfully serious undertaking of language. “Narcotic,
unworldly, a toxic doctrine
of undivine retribution.” …. throw away the thesaurus, or not. Either way, a consciousness of the body in poetic form.

[Ramona · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully inventive, original book.

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding.