Garden Physic

Garden Physic is a radical poetic movement through plant life. With her singular line, she journeys readers through an investigation of how we articulate our ecological surrounds in language through botanical histories. With a structure that emulates the style of classic manuscripts, Legris’s book deploys humour, deep intellect, and a fanatical obsession with the potential of language, punching through the cliches of contemporary nature writing. A brief snapshot: how to write about flowers without the nauseating sentimental phraseology? No quaint, no dainty, no winsome. This smells good, that smells bad, my hands rank with manure. This at least is pure. The whole book is a glorious meditation on the garden and the power of plants: how they can heal us, emotionally and physically, and how we communicate with them.

Praise: "A dazzling, innovative storehouse of delight - a poetic adventure that explores the intimacy, attachment and passions that exist between plants and human beings. Legris has forged a collection that digs its fingers into the soil, that is root-linked, green hearted, made of the earth." - Rebecca Tamás "[Legris] offers the reader a "physic" in its archaic sense, as remedies for ailments... Bookish gardeners will delight in this playful modern-day florilegium." - Publisher's Weekly "In this bright, blazing book of poems, Sylvia Legris throws language into new and revelatory relations ... Garden Physic brings to the ecological poem a language lush enough to be arrested by, to be changed by, to get lost in. I adore it" - Seán Hewitt