William Morris in His Disappointment Garden
Damp-squib grammar of pretty things and wild mignonette.Quercitron bark. Old fustic’s persistently pissy stamen,the peony-stained wallpaper. Despite the conspicuous hot spots,sun, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, yellow’s a letdown nevertheless.The repeating motifs? Killers. Jasmine twill, jasmine trellis ...Trifoliate moth-traps these wool and cotton undersellers.Envisage Little Chintz or Corncockle (where the flower playsbut a minor part), or an indigo-discharged rose. And the bugs!Kermes, cochineal. A scuffle of ripe and ruin among rosebudand campion, columbine and vine. So heartsunk am I of tusser silkand cotton velveteen. Fuffling if nothing this art of color or perish.Lacking compassion for lac-dye and up to the elbows in vermillionmelodrama ... I’m dyeing, I’m dyeing ...
Feature Date
- November 6, 2021
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“William Morris in His Disappointment Garden,” by Sylvia Legris, from GARDEN PHYSIC, copyright © 2021 by Sylvia Legris.
Use by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
"Over the past twenty years, Canadian poet Sylvia Legris has quietly built a remarkable, multilayered body of work worthy of deep exploration and appreciation. An artist of relentless evolution and experimentation, Legris’s poetics compress and expand, infusing elements of dance, botany, and human machinery into new structures and imagery that is at once wildly imaginative and deeply visceral."
—Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Music & Literature
"Garden Physic is the author’s best book in a so-far stellar career."
—Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press
"For Legris, the sum of life is not necessarily sense, story, or quanta but is also a strange summation of unknowing."
—Shane Neilson, Poetry
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