Sleep Gate - Sylvia Legris

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.