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Garden Physic
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.
“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.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
Published April 7, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
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September 26, 2024As far as we know, what happens in our gardens occurs nowhere nearby in our cosmic neighborhood, which elevates the magic and miracle of our gardening. Sylvia Legris seems to delight in this, building a poetics that is fervent, bouncy, wacky, and even celestial in scope, cataloging the drift of Venus and other bodies above the garden: "Perseids seed the 3b hardiness zone... Double clusters and heliotropes, sunflowers under Swift-Tuttle showers." The opening poems of Garden Physic consider the reduction of plants to the mere "idea of plants"—their power and prowess dulled by single-minded pursuits. But Legris recovers so much of their magnificence. "Pharmacy begins in plants," she announces. "Plants are the flesh of the Gods. / In the Kingdoms of Nature the final authority is earth." In a word: incantatory!
December 7, 2021
best collection of poetry of 2021 by far, especially considering the falling silent of the avant-garde amidst an inundation of commercialized pop-poetry in the past decade and a half or so. sylvia legris is an unsung master of contemporary verse, and it is a shame she is so unknown outside the spheres of new directions and its niche disciples. garden physic is enigmatic and inventive, completely revising my formerly doomed prospects of the world of poetry in the 21st century in lieu of a blossoming erudition that feels almost miraculous in its prosaic, yet abstract, qualities that almost leaves the taste of ambrosia on your tongue as you wet your fingers to turn the pages, anticipating convolutions of pound’s holy trinity of melo-, phano-, and logopoeia all synesthesized and confounded in an apothecary of flowering tendrils. don’t let the cover fool you; despite it’s almost innocuous and instagrammopoetic sensibilities, what lies within is a genius worthy of the wunderkammer that contains ashbery, carson, alexander, howe, and other linguistic oddities.
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May 29, 2022AgAIN I am frusrated because somebody has not properly sorted out the GoodReads page for this book and they even neglected to list the page count for the Grant[a] edition who is up to this
Sylvia here is crisp and crinkly and precisely what I'd hoped for. Personally I find there's an incredible opportunity here in the comparison between this and Lucy Mercer's Emblem (which I slightly prefer but I'm biased xoxo). I have no hesitation in describing Garden Physic as a primary envoy of what I'm deciding to call the botanic turn.
Legris really charmed me here in her tugging threads of Latin and Greek which aren't Classical so much as classificatory, earthy rather than epic. I adore that and I think we should see more multilingualism used in this playful register. It's also entirely possible to miss this and dart about in her hairpin sentence structures to the delight of everybody mwah x
Sylvia here is crisp and crinkly and precisely what I'd hoped for. Personally I find there's an incredible opportunity here in the comparison between this and Lucy Mercer's Emblem (which I slightly prefer but I'm biased xoxo). I have no hesitation in describing Garden Physic as a primary envoy of what I'm deciding to call the botanic turn.
Legris really charmed me here in her tugging threads of Latin and Greek which aren't Classical so much as classificatory, earthy rather than epic. I adore that and I think we should see more multilingualism used in this playful register. It's also entirely possible to miss this and dart about in her hairpin sentence structures to the delight of everybody mwah x
September 12, 2023
In love with the madness of this book.
October 22, 2024
I found Garden Physic harder to track with than 2024's The Principle of Rapid Peering. It feels more experimental--and more dependent on a reader who can approximate Legris's deep familiarity with the natural world. Still, it pulses with delightful strangeness as it catalogs all the growing things in the garden and the various spiritual and medicinal ways they act on us. My favorites in Garden Physic were the playful epistolary poems between V. and H.
Read
December 16, 2022will have to reread when i’m not delirious in an airport but LOVED yay plants
August 13, 2023
Violet
A garland to fend off the dizzies.
A garland to keep the quinsy at bay.
March closes the seeded umbilicus.
April opens the musty secundina.
Equinox the half-melt rot.
Easter the thin asquintable light. [19]
Read
May 9, 2025This was a Montreal impulse buy and it didn't really work for me but it is very beautiful.
December 16, 2023
Plants Reduced to the Idea of Plants
The flourish, the fanfare, the febrifugic feverfew
An oleaginous emplastrum—with horehound leaf,
olive over olive, the oily parts, the dry.
An antidote for the unblessed, the blistering,
the dourly flowering flora, the corpse flora.
Greek turned Latin turned inordinately
angled and filed.
Plants reduced to the idea of plants reduced to woodcuts
(circa 16th century) reduced to Victorian floor tile.
Travel by river snail, by liver of mad dog.
By God Greek Juniper! By monoxide of lead.
Travel under government of the moon
with arrach wild and stinking.
Flower and seed through August from June.
The butcher, the barber, the oil-boiling cauterizer.
The vegetal assiduousness, the pennyword diligence. (2)
from White Flower II
Canvas
Springbeauty. The eye unblanks the mesa. Solitary & leafless.
White tackstem. Common yarrow. Wild plum. A discplined
plumb line. Boundless butte: a perfect geometry. Midvein math
of spreading sandwort (100 yellow disc florets). Fibonacci the
daisy tidytips. The radially symmetrical rose heath, ray-bright.
Heather the bell-ringer. Mountain pea, pony beebalm, phlox.
Fringepod & pricklyleaf, the dense rosettes of Buckey’s yucca.
Four-o-clock verbena the high tabeland wavers. Repeating
alkali marsh aster. Saltword. Saxifrage. Mudbrick and grid.
Adobe. Abide, in unblinking light. Blazing star. Sacred datura. (21)
Dearest,
Some thoughts on shade.
I screen my eyes against sun a shade of canary bird zinnia.
Yellow is remembrance, the scent of an absent friend.
Red is steadfastness, the heart, a hummingbird chasing nectar.
On the north side of the house rhododendrons,
the shade-loving azaleas, a splendid contradiction
of charming and lethal—mad honey—
the thinking-of-home-bush, the affections held back.
—H. (43)
from Flowers of Brass [Book 5.88]
Part 1. Indissoluble Earth
The first poem about the last book is where the garden begins.
Sand and prolific dust.
Metals and earth.
Earth like small coals from a pitch tree.
Burnt red earth.
Big-veined bituminous earth.
*
Supreme earth has the disposition of medicine.
Earth that cools the pores.
Earth that closes cuts and heals sores.
Earths capable of absorbing acids.
Earths aluminous with spores.
The forgotten earths, the excavated.
The earths of bones and horns.
*
Animals and earth.
Vegetables and earth.
Geodes, whetstone, soot, and earth.
*
Pharmacy begins in plants.
Plants are the flesh of the Gods.
In the Kingdoms of Nature the final authority is earth. (55)
The flourish, the fanfare, the febrifugic feverfew
An oleaginous emplastrum—with horehound leaf,
olive over olive, the oily parts, the dry.
An antidote for the unblessed, the blistering,
the dourly flowering flora, the corpse flora.
Greek turned Latin turned inordinately
angled and filed.
Plants reduced to the idea of plants reduced to woodcuts
(circa 16th century) reduced to Victorian floor tile.
Travel by river snail, by liver of mad dog.
By God Greek Juniper! By monoxide of lead.
Travel under government of the moon
with arrach wild and stinking.
Flower and seed through August from June.
The butcher, the barber, the oil-boiling cauterizer.
The vegetal assiduousness, the pennyword diligence. (2)
from White Flower II
Canvas
Springbeauty. The eye unblanks the mesa. Solitary & leafless.
White tackstem. Common yarrow. Wild plum. A discplined
plumb line. Boundless butte: a perfect geometry. Midvein math
of spreading sandwort (100 yellow disc florets). Fibonacci the
daisy tidytips. The radially symmetrical rose heath, ray-bright.
Heather the bell-ringer. Mountain pea, pony beebalm, phlox.
Fringepod & pricklyleaf, the dense rosettes of Buckey’s yucca.
Four-o-clock verbena the high tabeland wavers. Repeating
alkali marsh aster. Saltword. Saxifrage. Mudbrick and grid.
Adobe. Abide, in unblinking light. Blazing star. Sacred datura. (21)
Dearest,
Some thoughts on shade.
I screen my eyes against sun a shade of canary bird zinnia.
Yellow is remembrance, the scent of an absent friend.
Red is steadfastness, the heart, a hummingbird chasing nectar.
On the north side of the house rhododendrons,
the shade-loving azaleas, a splendid contradiction
of charming and lethal—mad honey—
the thinking-of-home-bush, the affections held back.
—H. (43)
from Flowers of Brass [Book 5.88]
Part 1. Indissoluble Earth
The first poem about the last book is where the garden begins.
Sand and prolific dust.
Metals and earth.
Earth like small coals from a pitch tree.
Burnt red earth.
Big-veined bituminous earth.
*
Supreme earth has the disposition of medicine.
Earth that cools the pores.
Earth that closes cuts and heals sores.
Earths capable of absorbing acids.
Earths aluminous with spores.
The forgotten earths, the excavated.
The earths of bones and horns.
*
Animals and earth.
Vegetables and earth.
Geodes, whetstone, soot, and earth.
*
Pharmacy begins in plants.
Plants are the flesh of the Gods.
In the Kingdoms of Nature the final authority is earth. (55)
January 1, 2023
Buku pertama tandas baca di 2023 jatuh pada buku puisi unik dan nyentrik karya #SlyviaLegris penulis dari Kanada. Buku #GardenPhysic ini direkomendasikan staff @agrobookstore waktu aku berkunjung ke sana bulan lalu. Namanya jualan pasti dia manis banget bicara soal buku ini yang membuatku tergoda buat beli. Menurutku poin bahwa buku puisi ini unik untuk dibaca benar, sebab semua puisinya hasil dari pengamatan dan refleksi keindahan berkebun yang Sylvia lakuan. Secara serius dia mempelajari tanaman dan bagaimana tanaman hidup. Dia menghidupi dan menghidupkan tanaman-tanamannya jadi puisi. Tidak cuma itu dia tambahkan beberapa soal hewan jadi sentral buku ini bukan manusia.
Celakanya, aku bukan orang biologi. Aku suka tanaman tapi tidak detail mempelajarinya. Akhirnya banyak sekali kosa kata yang tidak aku pahami, jujur membedakan ini species tumbuhan dan ini sebuah bahasa puisi sangat sulit. Cakep tulisannya tapi maknanya entah aku paham atau tidak.
Untung di akhir buku ini ada semacam appendix untuk membantu pembaca memahami konteks. Walaupun masih nggak paham-paham banget tapi pengalaman membaca buku ini seru untuk menyadarkan aku bahwa pengetahuan biologiku belum cukup menghadapi tantangan zaman. Aku harus terus membaca dan belajar. Azeeeek 😜
#WhatSekarReads #WhatSekarReads2023
Celakanya, aku bukan orang biologi. Aku suka tanaman tapi tidak detail mempelajarinya. Akhirnya banyak sekali kosa kata yang tidak aku pahami, jujur membedakan ini species tumbuhan dan ini sebuah bahasa puisi sangat sulit. Cakep tulisannya tapi maknanya entah aku paham atau tidak.
Untung di akhir buku ini ada semacam appendix untuk membantu pembaca memahami konteks. Walaupun masih nggak paham-paham banget tapi pengalaman membaca buku ini seru untuk menyadarkan aku bahwa pengetahuan biologiku belum cukup menghadapi tantangan zaman. Aku harus terus membaca dan belajar. Azeeeek 😜
#WhatSekarReads #WhatSekarReads2023
January 15, 2025
“The yard wants what the yard wants. / Bloom of Ruth. Breath of life. Blush.” I really enjoyed Garden Physic, the new poetry collection by Sylvia Legris, coming 7 April from Granta Poetry. The gorgeous sprouting poems feel so vibrant, both in terms of their imagery and their rhythm, constantly conjuring a world of nature, perfect escapism for anyone living in a flat in a city with no garden of their own… I enjoyed the imagined Vita Sackville-West letters, especially ‘My Dear Love,’ (“Mad March dreams / of crane flowers, / birds of paradise.”) and the striking closing lines of ‘My Darling,’“An experiment of apparition and whim. / A good great ghost of a garden!” Later this imaginary Vita asks one of Legris’ most vital questions: “How to write about flowers without the nauseating sentimental phraseology?” The collection closes with the brilliant, formally inventive and beautifully designed ‘De Materia Medica’ sequence, which really showcases the subtle touch Legris has cultivated in her work. (And Granta Poetry continues to delight!)
November 25, 2022
This seemed like a really compelling topic for a poetry collection, but in the end the poems seem a bit too showy and self absorbed to really be enjoyable. Perhaps if there were pictures of the various esoteric flora being mentioned it would be more sensible and easier to enjoy but I sensed you really need to enjoy this book with a reference book alongside and that sort of steals the fun of the poetry.
July 1, 2023
a really nice surprise. initially approached thinking this was a classic example of endowing the mundane with epic proportions, but when you think about it, plants are really where it all starts and ends, "the Gods of the earth" as Legris writes. so if anything these poems bring them back down to our realm
Read
April 13, 2024“Robust and rubicond
the rub a dub rubdown,
the salved, the weary,
the Attic-honeyed muscles
crushed. Rubbed ruddy,
rubbed raw—Gad!
God! the crud toe muck,
the goat soap scut.”
(From “Grime from the Baths” pg. 69)
the rub a dub rubdown,
the salved, the weary,
the Attic-honeyed muscles
crushed. Rubbed ruddy,
rubbed raw—Gad!
God! the crud toe muck,
the goat soap scut.”
(From “Grime from the Baths” pg. 69)
December 8, 2025
it's like listening to plants if they spoke in the language we handed them--imperfect, baroque, lapidary. the greenery has grown gorgeous around the mossy & illegible remains of erasmus darwin. "so heartsunk am I of tusser silk / and cotton velveteen"
May 8, 2022
A challenge for anyone without a thoroughly intimate and specific knowledge of plants (you will come away with this knowledge). All the same an intricate and enriching read.
July 4, 2022
Gorgeous & clever. A poetry book or reference book. Affirmations and fact. It feels like a celebration & a warning. It’s form is fantastic.
January 28, 2023
I wish I'd written this book as my dissertation. Instead I'll grow in its shadow, a shade-loving shrub!
February 7, 2024
Had high hopes, was disappointed.
May 8, 2025
4.5 stars
March 26, 2024
These poems are inspired and dedicated to nature and its healing powers. As a nature lover myself, this little book made me feel at home. The comparisons between plants and the human body enhanced in my mind and reminded me of their similarities.
Ever-giving mother nature, ever-fruitful and loving it's always there to embrace us and heal us. I loved how at the end the author provides a list of healing plants and certain uses one can give to each one depending on what we want to treat. It reminded me of my grandmothers and their ready-to-use at home potions to heal anything. Maybe that's why I felt at home reading these poems.
Ever-giving mother nature, ever-fruitful and loving it's always there to embrace us and heal us. I loved how at the end the author provides a list of healing plants and certain uses one can give to each one depending on what we want to treat. It reminded me of my grandmothers and their ready-to-use at home potions to heal anything. Maybe that's why I felt at home reading these poems.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews