Sleep Gate
Sylvia Legris
We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.
To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.
From the publisher
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.