Garden Physic

A musical celebration of the garden, from chaff to grass, and all of its lowly weeds, herbs, and creaturesSylvia Legriss Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the worlds 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, Legriss poems map the garden as body and the body as gardenher words at home in the phytological and anatomicallike 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 Zukofskys 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.