Published on 2 April 2024
Conversation conducted on: Thursday 23 November 2023
Rather than waiting passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of “rapid peering.” Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray of poems that together form a kind of almanac or naturalist’s notebook in verse. Here is “where nature converges with words,” as the poet walks through prairie habitats near her home in Saskatchewan, through lawless chronologies and mellifluous strophes of strobili and solstice. Moths appear frequently, as do birds and plants and larvae, all meticulously observed and documented with an oblique sense of the pandemic marking the seasons. Elements of weather, ornithology, entomology, and anatomy feed her condensed, inflective lines, making the heart bloom and the intellect dance.
Sylvia Legris’s latest poetry collection is The Principle of Rapid Peering, forthcoming in spring 2024 with New Directions in the US and with Corsair Books in the UK. Her collection Garden Physic (Granta 2022; New Directions 2021) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was named a Best Poetry Book of the Year by both The Times (UK) and by CBC Radio in Canada. Garden Physic was also longlisted for The Laurel Prize for a poetry collection about nature or the environment. Her other collections include The Hideous Hidden, Pneumatic Antiphonal, and Nerve Squall, which was winner of both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, she lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan where temperatures range from +40 Celsius in the summer to -50 Celsius in the winter. She is a strong believer in puffy snow pants.
The event will be chaired by poet Lucy Mercer, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (RENEW).
Please email for more information: l.mercer@exeter.ac.uk
The Principles of Rapid Peering by Sylvia Legris (Click on the image to discover more).
