A HABIT OF LANDSCAPE

Armitage’s body of poems draws from the earth, generations of family, and revery.

The speaker is one with the grasslands, the farmlands, and the ancient landscapes that provide the settings of many of the poems. The imagery of trees and stones and a relic four-wheel drive transport readers to distant, quiet places where there’s room to meander alongside the speaker, whose memory dates as far back as dancing in the womb (“Invitro Bandstand”). There is a timelessness to this collection; the way memories live in the present through artifacts has a special way of transcending linear narratives. “In Aunt Alice’s Root Cellar” shows the speaker, sorting through 60 years of stored bric-a-brac under an inherited farmhouse, observing “Out on these dry plains there was a vision of paradise. / Taking these steps one more time, in this scarab of self, / I realize death is making one light enough to leave.” In “A Butterfly Once Landed,” a mourning cloak butterfly and the speaker’s brother join forces in the Houston Botanical Gardens: “They had so much in common!/ Nymphalis antiope [sic] and multiple myeloma. / Both wore black wingtips. / Both were on oxygen.” Animals are revered, their histories considered as important as that of humans, in “Plainsong,” delivered from the perspective of an eagle: “You could read a long ancestral ecology from my nest, / reworked sometimes for over 100 years, / aerial dendrochronology…” The poem “Cecil” is dedicated to a beloved Zimbabwean lion killed by trophy hunters, his once-vibrant form reduced to humble remains. The speaker brings wonder and deliberation to the subjects of each piece. The formal elements of the work are masterful—the use of empty space on the page in some of the poems, caesura, and the occasional inclusion of Latin terminology and (potentially) unfamiliar names of plants are a few devices that punctuate the verses and compel a deliberate reading. The poet has a way of extracting beauty from the most ordinary images, providing a reminder that everything in this world has significance, everything is connected, and we are all parts of an intricate web of life and death.

The natural world and human nature unite in this essential collection.