An antidote to ash

So often contemporary poetry is concerned with politics, posturing or posing. Poets long for sympathy for their plight, admiration for their strength or confirmation of their virtue. It is always refreshing, therefore, to encounter poems that properly inhabit poetry’s native landscape: words and their music.

Sylvia Legris’s reputation has grown stealthily over the years, from recognition in her native Canada (she won the Griffin prize in 2006) to greater visibility in the US and now – after Garden Physic, published by Granta in 2022 (TLS, July 22, 2022) – a readership in the UK. Her work is, in Ezra Pound’s term, “melopoeic”: the impact of words is intensified by their sound. In particular, she has become a specialist in the harmonies and clashes of specific technical language. Garden Physic worked with and around botanical terminology. In this new volume, her focus is on birds and insects, some of which are depicted in the poet’s own drawings. A line from Emily Dickinson (“split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music – ”) is Legris’s inspiration, as she seeks to describe the world without killing its vitality and movement. A drawing of a moth in flight – “Lesser grapevine looper liftoff” – demonstrates that this is not “Still Life”.
The title of this latest collection comes from an essay by the American naturalist Joseph Grinnell, “The Principle of Rapid Peering, in Birds” (1921). Birdlife brings to Legris’s work a new staccato, sometimes even pizzicato sound:

Blackbirds, magpies, meadowlarks, grackles
a roving aggregation of Icterids

  – peckish, rapid-peering
stops over
at a park with a panoptical view of slough …

This is about keenness of per­ception as well as melody and sound. A bird hatches with a “typographic knack”; a blackbird’s “eyes reflect a bony-socketed sun”. Google might be a necessary companion: “apneic suspension”, “gathering hemolymph”, “Yablochkovian glow”. But the Tennysonian delight in language is intoxicating: “a larval tutelary sky”; “Vitrines of snow globes with bone chip snow”; “root-lined nests in the underwings of elms”.

If you want human interest, behind these poems seems to be a woman who, while she is never short of words, is short of breath. Those bronchial structures to which Legris so often returns – trees in leaf, birds on the wing – find a counterpart in her asthmatic lungs. The twin crises of climate change and Covid-19 loom large. But the specificity of these poems is an antidote to general foreboding: against “prevailing winds of asthma and ash”, “A full-flower moon ignites a conflagration / of flight-feeding nightjars”.

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