Sleep Gate - by Sylvia Legris (Paperback)

About the Book

Sleep Gate considers flora, fauna, and issues around climate through a surreal portal: the dreamer's mirror.

Book Synopsis

Sleep Gate considers flora, fauna, and issues around climate through a surreal portal: the dreamer's mirror.

In Sleep Gate, Sylvia Legris descends into biological dreaming itself: the sleep beneath sleep, where 'the dream under the dream / is the dream of plants'. Taking up Inger Christensen's summons to 'dream our way inward', and H.D.'s insistence that the dream is 'no poetic phantasy / but a biological reality', these poems dissolve the waking world into the fabric of sleep, drawing the natural and the built alike into its slow respiration. Animating a whole taxonomy of sleepers - a ruby-throated hummingbird whose dream is a nest 'hinging on spider silk', a honeybee with 'perfect recall of citrus one thousand and fifty-seven flowers ago', an earthworm fleeing 'by slow peristaltic wave' - Legris follows sleep through phylum and season. Sensuous, Latinate and strange, this extraordinary collection captures the disjunctive, jump-cutting logic of dreams, leaping from a time before 'the clouds are inventoried' to winter's 'gnashing bruxism', and assembles the world, as one does on waking, through distortion and towards clarity.

Review Quotes

'What a mistake it was to take a short break after reading page 88. To stay with Legris' voice is to subject oneself to a willed hypnosis that one must snap out of to put the book down mid-read. Sleep Gate is the beneficiary of this voice, at once mercurially dense, nimble, sonically effortless and spectrally haunting. The paucity of verbs in this collection is a remarkable demonstration that the mind's visual apparatus has its own action, flow, rhythm and pathos. I think this is what it means to be a visionary. Sleeping is one third of our lives; Sleep Gate, with its enchantingly frosty music, is an urgent message that we not waste that third.'
-- Oluwaseun Olayiwola, author of Strange Beach

'[T]he Tennysonian delight in language is intoxicating... the specificity of these poems is an antidote to general foreboding.'
-- Graeme Richardson, TLS (praise for The Principle of Rapid Peering)

'Sensuous, brainy and cardiovascular, Garden Physic is a cutting-edge ode to plants, teeming with human knowledge and natural mystery, accompanied by gem-like illustrations by the poet.'
― Kit Fan, Guardian (praise for Garden Physic)

'A dazzling, innovative storehouse of delight.'
― Rebecca Tamás, author of WITCH (praise for Garden State)

About the Author