We've joined forces with the incredible Granta Books to launch two of our PBS Summer Selections: Sylvia Legris' radical botanical Garden Physic and Lucy Mercer's innovative Emblem! Join us at 7pm on zoom on the 13th April for this unique in-conversation event. Both poets will read from their new collections, talk all things poetry and nature - we can't wait!
Sylvia Legris is a critically acclaimed Canadian poet. She is the recipient of the Griffin Prize for poetry, and author of The Hideous Hidden (2016). Her new collection GARDEN PHYSIC (Granta, 7th April) is our PBS Summer Recommendation. These glinting studies on flora - mariner's root, throatwort, wild rocket, cuckoo point - create an abundant and fluorescent vegetal mesh. Combining the histories of botanical manuscripts and pharmacopeias with imagined letters between garden designers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson and playful illustrations throughout, these are truly luscious poems. Garden Physic is a radical defence of our ancient symbiosis with living greenery; a poetic manifesto on how to live, heal, and nourish.
Lucy Mercer’s innovative debut collection EMBLEM (Prototype, 20th April) won the inaugural White Review Poet’s Prize and is our PBS Summer Choice. Emblem, reuses images from Andrea Alciato’s early modern emblem book the Emblematum liber and revitalises this forgotten hybrid form to contemplate the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior. Lucy's poems have been published widely in magazines and in anthologies like Altered States (Ignota, 2022). She has also collaborated with artists to produce work for Glasgow International and Kunstverein Freiburg, as well as a text-image pamphlet Renewal (Kelder Press, 2021).