Sylvia Legris is originally from Winnipeg and now lives in Saskatoon. Nerve Squall is her third book of poetry, and in addition to the Griffin Poetry Prize, it has also garnered the 2006 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and is nominated for a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her poems have been published in many journals, including Border Crossings, Room of One’s Own, and CV2. Her previous books are iridium seeds and circuitry of veins.
Legris has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses Series and in 2001 won the Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize for Fishblood Sky. Legris also received an Honourable Mention in the poetry category of the 2004 National Magazine Awards.
Judges’ Citation
Sylvia Legris’ high-octane poems are powered by ‘atmospheric overload’.
Sylvia Legris’ high-octane poems are powered by ‘atmospheric overload’. Her eye is that of the twenty-first century – zooming from satellite to microscope – but her focus and coherence are increasingly rare in this age. In her hands, language refracts in ways which break open etymology to bring us more sense rather than less. Legris’ poems build like chords from sub- to super-sonic and, even at their most rapid and heightened point, sustain the force of poetic enquiry. There is always, as she says, ‘something on your hook, you feel it’.
Selected poems
by Sylvia Legris
Stumped Sky (Questions of Missing Weather and Birds)
4
Everything fades to …
Whiteout. Hypnotic and nose-close to hypothermia.
Blizzard-blinding (snow like something out of Fargo).
Winter a mile-high silver screen
tarnished to monotone. Unrelenting;
an eight-months’ sustained
sub-zero note.
—
Look down,
look down,
look waaay down …
It’s as if you were never here (you start to believe this).
Walk the same footprints every day
and every day they disappear — drowning
in the whiteness of it all, hyper-invisibly visible;
white trudging white.
Copyright © Sylvia Legris, 2005
Agitated Sky Etiology
5
Unshakable birds! (Being followed? Being watched?) Run run but never escape the flutter of wings in your chest.
—
Demon-faced birds stare daggers from building ledges and at every corner you turn (every corner you turn!) … Twitching birds (nit-crawling catastrophe carriers), Tourettic birds (odious-odious-odious), birds skulking in turrets (Stone-Feathered Gargoyles, your cries for help
just so much sputtering).
—
Featherless. Hopeless! Overwhelmed with bird urges and the compulsion to tic the compulsion to tic the compulsion …
Are you dreaming? Are you sleeping? (Dormez-vous? Dormez-cheep-cheep …)
Copyright © Sylvia Legris, 2005