ABSTRACT
Elisabeth Bletsoe invokes the language of prescientific European herbal traditions rooted in bioempathic connections between human and vegetal beings. In addition to Pharmacopœia and The Regardians, Bletsoe has published the collection Landscape from a Dream, featuring the "Birds of the Sherborne Missal" sequence, as well as the earlier chapbook Portraits of the Artist's Sister, loosely based on the female subjects of Edvard Munch's paintings, lithographs, letters, and journals. Bletsoe's vegetal praxis, bioempathic emplacement discloses herbal nature as a function of where plants grow and with whom— or with what— they relate. Vegetal empathy is thus bioempathic feeling into and with plants that conversely entails openness to being affected by plant gestures in response. Through the placement of the Botanicum Officinale extract in the poem's final lines, Bletsoe challenges the formal distinction between stinking iris and sweet flag, tacitly emphasizing their analogous habits, habitats, effusions, and phenomenological shifts.
