Sylvia Legris, Sleep Gate

 

Subwake Palette, Fog

Saline flat of silvery saltbush,
scurfy, a twinflower’s tinny tone. 

A figment of sea-blite
in a spindrift of congested clusters. 

Umbrella plant in its gaseous form
consolidates into dense umbels, 

the air dangling grey note-stems,
a pink sundown glissando of suspension.

The latest from award-winning Saskatoon, Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris is the collection Sleep Gate (London UK: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026). A Canadian edition of the same is scheduled to appear with Thistledown Press in May 2027, the publication of which will mark her first Canadian-made book in twenty years [do you remember when Canadian Karen Solie had similar, a British publication prior to later publication in Canada?]. There’s a tonal quality I’ve long appreciated with Legris’ writing, one of intimate and very precise attention, detailing the science and study of garden technicalities through exacting lyric. There’s a distance to her attentions, also, able to articulate such intimate details exactly through the ability to step back and see fully, with the poems of Sleep Gate also exploring the further elements of dreaming and sleep. If plants have consciousness, might they, too, dream? This aspect of detailed phylum is one her work has been exploring with increasing depth since her debut collection, Circuitry of Veins (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1996), a book I was immediately struck by, when it landed (I reviewed soon after it appeared, back when I wrote for a local entertainment weekly). Are an exploration of gardens Legris’ own variation on Kroetsch’s “Field Notes,” an umbrella under which all her writing sits? Since that long-ago debut, Legris has published an impressive array of collections, each of which step further into what has developed into an extended study of detailed plant life through the lyric: Iridium Seeds (Turnstone Press, 1998), the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Nerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005), Pneumatic Antiphonal (New York NY: New Directions, 2013), The Hideous Hidden (New Directions, 2016), Garden Physic (New Directions, 2021) [see my review of such here] and The Principle of Rapid Peering (New Directions, 2024) [see my review of such here], with even a trio, at least, of chapbooks as well, along the way.

There has long been a meditative quality to the lyric responses around gardening, including collections across the past twenty years or so such as the poem-cycle meditations of Ottawa poet Monty Reid’s Garden (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2014), New Jersey poet Emmalea Russo’s debut, G (Futurepoem, 2018) [see my review of such here], San Francisco poet Hazel White’s Vigilance Is No Orchard (New York NY: Nightboat, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Cole Swensen’s Ours: poems on the gardens of Andre Le Notre (University of California Press, 2008) [see my review of such here] and greensward (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Ducking Presse, 2010) [see my review of such here], to further works by Victoria poet Lorna Crozier and many, many, multiple others. On the surface, gardening lends itself easily to the meditative (see also: Virginia Woolf), with certain poets allowing different elements to shine through, whether instead or alongside the physical act of tending a garden. Legris, of course, is far less about meditative landscapes and cycles than a particular kind of close-look, leaning closer to the ways in which Michigan poet Jen Tynes and Toronto poet Jay MillAr have writ about mushrooms, from her Mushrooms Yearly Planner (above/ground press, 2021) to his Mycological Studies (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2002), as well as more recent further titles: Mycelial Person (Milwaukee WI: Vegetarian Alcoholic Poetry, 2021) [see my review of such here] by Queens, New York-based poet Amanda Monti, and Mycocosmic (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], by Lexington, Virginia poet Lesley Wheeler. Legris’ meditative element of gardening digs deep into study and research, blending two ecological sides, one might say, of the same coin into something far more exacting. Her poems emerge from detailed language, writing of plants without getting all abstract or sentimental, offering, throughout her work as a whole, a deep reading of phylum and season, instead of any specific meditative means through to a separate end. As the back cover of this collection offers, how this new work focuses on “biological dreaming itself: the sleep beneath sleep [.]” Beneath the surface of gardening, the tendrils and runners of Sleep Gate articulate a further element beneath the surface of dreaming, and sleep.

With sections “NIGHTJARRING,” “BIRDSONG IN THE HEAVY SILENCE OF SLEEP” and “FIRST LIGHT OF ROBIN,” Sleep Gate offers an incredibly dense lyric, one with a lightness across line and an agile language that delights in sound and vigor through her array of detailed scientific language. “The deranged dream geography / is cellulose and connective tissue,” she writes, amid the poem “An Unzipping,” “exoskeleton and fascia, / the full floral, faunal collage.” There’s an element of her work comparable to seeing the familiar through an electron microscope: most have never seen plant material this close, and with such a lens, articulated across a lyric of unsentimental lushness. “The clock strikes 12-petal fatigue. / The clock strikes leaf discolorization,” she writes, as part of the thirteen-part numbered sequence “Portulaca O’Clock,” “widening stomatal pores, // tendrils of dream entangled / with the act of breathing.” As well, the opening five poems share the same title—“In the wake of”—offering echoes and repetitions, much in the way the final poems in the same opening section—each titled “Vegetable Mineral Sleep”—play a curious sense of bookends, each side of the collection buffered by gentle lyric echoes. These moments, in their own ways, showcase Legris’ ability to craft such precise and subtle nuance of meaning and sound, offering lines that blend scientific terminology with a bouncing sense of sound that she is entirely in control of. As a fragment of the extended title sequence offers:

A sketch of the nyctitropic movement of leaves,
of the so-called conspicuous sleep of leaves, 

a nightfall of lateral leaflets,
a smattering of delta and slow-wave rain,
a syncopated auditory blueprint. 

            — —

To wit furtive winter birds,
a downwind of embryonic leaves,
underground, a cotyledonary sound chamber,
the echo of non-photosynthesis.