The Principle of Rapid Peering, Sylvia Legris
New Directions, 2024
Smart readers know that a new poetry title by Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris is worth noting, thus her latest, The Principle of Rapid Peering (New York NY: New Directions, 2024), following prior collections Circuitry of Veins (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1996), Iridium Seeds (Turnstone Press, 1998), the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Nerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2005), Pneumatic Antiphonal (New Directions, 2013), The Hideous Hidden (New Directions, 2016) and Garden Physic (New Directions, 2021). There are few poets working this kind of tone and scale, writing a particular intimate depth across both the expanse and distance, although one might see Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley, a poet originally from Saskatchewan, holding echoes (tendrils?) of Legris’ lyrics throughout her own.
As the online blurb for the collection offers: “The title of Sylvia Legris’ melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behavior of certain birds. 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.” Presented, as well, as her Covid-era collection, Legris examines specifics that pinpoint deep enough to bleed into an abstract, writing an anxiety that works to ground itself, quite literally, into a comfort of foliage and gardens; what emerges out of both the wild and cultivated earth. “Ring a ring o’ roses.” she writes, as the second section of the twelve-part sequence “Viscum Album,” “Broom root and mistletoe. / Ligneous chatterers. / Lungs halo March.” Given such, the poems across The Principle of Rapid Peering situate themselves across a Covid-specific timeline, neither forefront nor backdrop but as a constant presence, with pieces such as “Forecast Issued 5:00 am CST / Sunday 27 December 2020” and “Forecast Issued 6:00 am CST / Friday I January 2021.” The collection also hosts two Covid-quartets, equally titled “An Anatomy in Four Seasons,” the first of which holds titles “The First Spring of Covid,” “The First Summer,” “The First Fall” and “The First Winter” (one presumes you can discern the titles from the second sequence easily enough, hopefully). The garden, within its seasonal timelessness remains, but within the shadow of this particular period, as “The First Summer” offers:
Spring’s undying debate suspended in interpleural space.
The sky doubles
down with a butchery of rain,
seedlings slaughtered
amid monotonous water.
Every sodden second
another watershed moment
exits the lung-stream,
antediluvian elms desperate for breath.
Solstice, the air
stands still, the branches grasp.
Summer under a
canopy of arterial despair.
Legris is ever for the smart and unexpected lyric twist, offering perceptions thick with consideration, even as simple as the opening line of the final poem ““Recollections of the Future”,” that reads: “Weather was measured in calories.” The collection is organized in two parts: the first, into poem-sections “The Air is Seeded,” “Ground Truth” and “Occasionally the Field of Possibilities”; and the second second is made up of three poems, opening with a longer sequence, “The Walk, or The Principle of Rapid Peering,” a poem subtitled “(Also known as A Trek of Air, A Living Poem).” Furthering the accomplishments of her prior collections, Legris’ poems offer precisions, although less of the carved diamond than a lyric of fleshy richness and layers, composing a cosmology of ground effect; these are hard-working hands rich with soil, as “The Second Summer” from the second sequence “An Anatomy in Four Seasons” begins: “The post-winter grousing of melt and pout / (a spring of noncommittal petulance) / overpowered by bitterroot’s parched optimism.”
Legris has evolved into composing poetry collections as field studies, and her attention to the natural world, centred on and around her garden, expands across this collection into a framing of those first two-plus uncertain years of the Covid-era. As the poem “Forecast Issued 6:00 am CST / Friday I January 2021” begins: “7:00 AM the sky a hypothetical blue / blue outside the geographic range of blue, / accidental, a blue-grey gnatcatcher.” There are moments the Covid-era shows itself only through the particulars of those dates, those seasons, and that underlying uncertainty, held into certainty through what otherwise remained unaffected: the colour of the sky, for example, or the attentions of birds. If her prior collections focused on the what and why of plants and planting, this collection offers itself as a way into the routine of attending that same garden as, again, a grounding, offering a way to find footing across an uncertain era; through her attending to birds, moths, plants and seasons, Legris charts those uncertainties, all amid her ongoing and continued search for possibilities. As the eighth and final “Occasionally the Field of Possibilities” poem closes:
Occasionally the
field of possibilities
is the erstwhile bronchial
understory
in an iteration of
brash Icteridae,
grasslocked &
syllabilizing,
a twelve-bird octave,
a slew
of ground-foraging
blackbirds.
rob mclennan’s [selfie, with Aoife, taken in Perth, Ontario] collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a trilogy of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022).
