Book Review

The sensation of reading Sylvia Legris’s The Principle of Rapid Peering is one of catch-what-catch-can, an opportunistic experience like being a spore in an evolving world, where bird consumes moth, wind consumes bird. It is also an exercise in observation as an active pursuit. The title comes from a nineteenth-century treatise that places common birds into one of two groups, distinguished by their eating style: those that passively wait for food to come to them, and those that actively pursue their prey. Legris writes poems describing the seasons of COVID—for instance, “An Anatomy in Four Seasons: The First Spring of Covid”—when people turned inward and waited for news of the advancing pandemic, a period of relative stasis that is punctured by her acute observations of the natural world where she lives in Saskatchewan, a practice of rapid peering for experience that becomes a window for her poetry, mirroring the practice of energetic birds.

The rigorous invention of new vocabularies to describe avians and birdsong is familiar territory for Legris, whose Pneumatic Antiphonal was the advent of a deeply sourced anatomical and ornithological style:

The theory of corpuscular flight is the cardinal premise

of red birds carrying song-particles carrying oxygen.

Erythrocytic. Sticky. Five quarts of migration.

The poems of Pneumatic’s “bird and lung field,” as Legris calls it in her notes to Rapid Peering, are specifically referenced in several of Peering’s poems. But the style becomes more expansive in its interaction with the full-forested environment. The title of each poem in the “Occasionally the Field of Possibilities” series serves as the first line, and in “Occasionally the Field of Possibilities [4],” the poem continues:

Is a coevolved canopy

of wing scale & leaf,

a broadband acoustic cloak

deflecting echo & foe,

wavelengths of powder & light,

a cloud of stacked platelets,

a thin-film percussion,

hair-penciled and interlinear,

sparkling archaic sun moths,

a microlepidopterous register.

The canopy and the moth have “coevolved,” such that “wing” mirrors “leaf” in scale. There is a negative image of sound—an “acoustic cloak”—where Pneumatic might have focused on a full-throated chorus of “song particles.” Indeed, the birds that perform that song are the “foe” the moths seek to “deflect” in the course of their leaf-scaled lives, setting up an interesting comment on the poet seeking to chart new territory and evade too much influence from her earlier efforts. And yet, “wavelengths of powder & light” evokes those same “song particles,” and the “erythrocytic” language of blood is likewise in evidence: “a cloud of stacked platelets.” Taken together, the “Occasionally the Field of Possibilities” sequence is an impressive development in Legris’s oeuvre while also hearkening back to the bizarre, quasi-scientific accumulations of sui generis language that drive collections like Pneumatic.

Legris’s epigraph to The Principle of Rapid Peering can be seen as another comment on the origin and influence of poetry:

So we really are lost, in a very odd way. We need to find our way through the landscape in order to draw the map, and at the same time we need to draw the map in order to find our way through the landscape.

The quote is from Susana Nied’s translation of The Condition of Secrecy, a collection of essays and poetic prose pieces by Inger Christensen, whom Eliot Weinberger described as “a formalist who makes her own rules, then turns the game around with another rule.” Legris finds structure in the language of natural science and in the process of cataloging the series of observations that unfold during her walks in Saskatchewan. She references Christensen but especially Robert Walser’s The Walk in the second part of this collection, which she calls a “Living Poem.” Legris has a way of seizing an object as ineffable as “air” and delivering evasive poetic insight, as in the first section of “The Walk,” titled “1. Like birds that perch and wait passively,” which opens Part II of the collection:

Vouch for the condition of air.

Old air? Bad air? Malarial?

Air of endless revision

and infinite transmission.

News World Air, CBC and CNN Air,

Regional Broadcast Air.

Cloying air like the air in a funeral home,

or an unfinished basement, or a root cellar.

Air that carries the DNA of many lungs.

The “extraocular wind” is protean, and ultimately charged with a valence of risk for transmission like which the moths address in their attempts to soundproof their navigation of the forest environment from the birds.

But it is the glory of the particular that fortifies this collection into bracing stuff. Legris’s accretions and secretions of detail penned during COVID are truly stunning, elevated from time-marking surveillance to intensely experienced, lightly worn scrutiny, as “1. Like birds that perch and wait passively” continues:

Vouch for 173 species of grass,

herbaceous with the poly-

saccharide clitter of exoskeleton

each with a corresponding suborder

songbird pitch.

The ferrous flavor of Pneumatic’s exploration of “the theory of corpuscular flight” and the gentle vivisection of the intimate particulars of avian anatomy has had time to grow, nestled within the forest, into

a stridulation

of probing beaks and proboscises,

wings with bones and wings

longways veined,

phalanx-like spikelets,

airborne seeds.

In Rapid Peering, Legris demonstrates her appetite for a sharply imagined aesthetic and theoretical life that emerges in the margins of the narrative surrounding a powerful virus. Nevertheless, she is aware of the conundrum of pandemic life and changes the rules of the collection by addressing “you,” the reader, in the final poem, “Recollections of the Future,” which is an elegy of the “former metabolism.”

All the lights in the sky were off when this happened.

After dark you could choose between eating and not tasting or sleeping

and not dreaming.

If you tasted and dreamt at the same time you would sleepwalk and sleep-

eat but all you would find in the fridge was a long-squeezed lemon half and

a fingernail scraping that was lost then found but unaccounted for.

If you ate and slept at the same time you would wake to sirens and loud

knocks and diminishing weather on the other side of the door.

Here is the same dichotomy of birds that wait passively and those that pursue prey, applied directly to the reader’s life, which occupies a position in the “dark” unknown. Facing an impossible choice, we are left with the afterimage of the brilliant streak of poetic logic and insight that illuminates the preceding pages.