Description

In Sleep Gate, Sylvia Legris descends into biological dreaming itself: the sleep beneath sleep, where ‘the dream under the dream / is the dream of plants’. Taking up Inger Christensen’s summons to ‘dream our way inward’, and H.D.’s insistence that the dream is ‘no poetic phantasy / but a biological reality’, these poems dissolve the waking world into the fabric of sleep, drawing the natural and the built alike into its slow respiration. Animating a whole taxonomy of sleepers – a ruby-throated hummingbird whose dream is a nest ‘hinging on spider silk’, a honeybee with ‘perfect recall of citrus one thousand and fifty-seven flowers ago’, an earthworm fleeing ‘by slow peristaltic wave’ – Legris follows sleep through phylum and season. Sensuous, Latinate and strange, this extraordinary collection captures the disjunctive, jump-cutting logic of dreams, leaping from a time before ‘the clouds are inventoried’ to winter’s ‘gnashing bruxism’, and assembles the world, as one does on waking, through distortion and towards clarity.

Publisher Review

‘What a mistake it was to take a short break after reading page 88. To stay with Legris’ voice is to subject oneself to a willed hypnosis that one must snap out of to put the book down mid-read. Sleep Gate is the beneficiary of this voice, at once mercurially dense, nimble, sonically effortless and spectrally haunting. The paucity of verbs in this collection is a remarkable demonstration that the mind’s visual apparatus has its own action, flow, rhythm and pathos. I think this is what it means to be a visionary. Sleeping is one third of our lives; Sleep Gate, with its enchantingly frosty music, is an urgent message that we not waste that third.’

– Oluwaseun Olayiwola, author of Strange Beach ‘To read these poems is to live as if in the dreamworld: lucid and lovely, dark and deranged. Like realising you’re dreaming, but choosing happily to remain, to inhabit the dream a little longer, more attuned than ever to the possibilities of the world, its ways, its language.’

– Juliano Zaffino, author of The Steps ‘Ravishing in its music, Sleep Gate is a song cycle of netherworld wanderings connecting us to our animal brains, circadian rhythms, and mineral dreamings. Sylvia Legris is completely singular – a 21st century mystic of language – and this book (part herbarium, part bestiary, part dream journal) is a revelation.’

– Richard Scott, author of That Broke into Shining Crystals ‘[T]he Tennysonian delight in language is intoxicating… the specificity of these poems is an antidote to general foreboding.’

Graeme Richardson,TLS (praise for The Principle of Rapid Peering) ‘As a poet, Legris is a master of the curving tangent, working her way around a central theme while simply inclining, dropping clippings, allowing the reader to follow, suspended, her careful meanderings, often grounded by a hard-working title or subtle allusion.’

Paul J. Pastor, Los Angeles Review of Books (praise for The Principle of Rapid Peering) ‘Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is the most refreshing book of the year. There’s nothing around quite like it.’

Graeme Richardson,The Sunday Times (praise for Garden Physic) ‘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.’

Kit Fan, Guardian (praise for Garden Physic) ‘A dazzling, innovative storehouse of delight.’

Rebecca Tamas, author of WITCH (praise for Garden State)