The Principle of Rapid Peering

A lyrical guide through Saskatchewan’s Aspen Parkland by a poet whose work is “fizzing with ecological intellect” (Times Literary Supplement).

Self-seeding wind

is a wind of ever-replenishing breath.

—from “The Walk, or The Principle of Rapid Peering”

The title of Sylvia Legris’ melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behavior of certain birds. Rather than wai...