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.
