Sylvia Legris
Sylvia Legris was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and now lives in Saskatchewan. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Conjunctions, and Granta, and her third collection of poetry, Nerve Squall, won the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Sylvia Legris was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and now lives in Saskatchewan. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Conjunctions, and Granta, and her third collection of poetry, Nerve Squall, won the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize.
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.
An impressive achievement—one facilitated by the poet’s singular, “wild-thoughted” vocabulary.
This is gardening on the level of Hecate or Baba Yaga: sorcerous, numinous, cunningly manipulating the chemical elements of life and death. And in keeping with this magic, Legris’s love for language plays unbounded among the joys of the botanical lexicon.
In The Hideous Hidden, Legris performs a poetic autopsy that untethers the language of the body and its “hideous hidden” from the morgue, the medical lab, the anatomy book—spaces from which women for centuries were long excluded—and creates from the history and language of this body her own stranger thing.
Legris’s microscopic attention is compelling and seductive, and from that narrow view it unexpectedly expands to tackle past and present, scientific and literary, private and public, and the rich histories that go with these dichotomies. Pulsing with secretions and excretions, her poetry saturates our imagination and invigorates our curiosity.
In her hands, language refracts in ways which break open etymology. Legris’s poems build like chords from sub- to super-sonic and, even at their most rapid and heightened point, sustain the force of poetic enquiry. There is always, as she says, ‘something on your hook, you feel it.’
Her work crackles with exuberant wackiness.
Rapidly gets deep and electric as the corded nerves running through the spinal channel.
The Hideous Hidden peels back the skin and takes us on a tour of our ‘fleshes,’ our ‘complicated riddle of meats,’ the ‘Vast. Vas. Vascular. Bladder-drenched city of organs.’ It is a tour de force through the vocabulary of the body’s parts and functions in sickness and health, waking and sleeping. With more than a passing glance at the history of its description. Most of all, it is a book that makes anatomy sing.