FROM A SANDSTONE LEDGE

Armitage explores memory, loss, place, and the tension between nature and development in these 14 poems grounded in time and place.

While we live in a culture that worships technological advancement and everything futuristic, the tone early on in this collection is one of preservationist lament. “Intaglio” mourns cultural erasure along Route 66 of the Texas/New Mexico border, contrasting the past of Comanche “collecting plants for medicine bundles / their weapons striking the speaking rock” with modern-day generic signage. The speaker finds unexpected companionship in visiting a flightless ring-necked duck, “un- / assuming in his indigo necklace,” paddling in wastewater at a treatment plant in “Memory in Water” (the speaker muses, “My aloneness meets yours. / Yet I am less alone when you are here / and to be here you are less free.”) Rocking chairs become the conduit for familial memories in “Xylem and Phloem,” in which the speaker conjures her grandfather using his flexed foot to give her a pony ride in one seat and her great-great-grandmother quilting in another. The book concludes with “To Make a Prairie,” an elegy for a short-grass prairie once teeming with wildlife and medicinal and food plants that has been replaced by “widened, improved roads, electrical / towers, the steel will of development” and a “vacuous sky.” In this quietly passionate poetry collection, Armitage aims to preserve personal, geographical, and historical remnants of the world around her. The poet’s voice is warm and familiar while insisting on bearing witness to a world where our relationship to nature is irrevocably changing. The intimate connection between people and nature is evident in lines like, “I unfurl the hose, bring the holy water: / you tap an inner sweetness // in this supplicant turned steward, / in this gesture of love.” Even inanimate objects come alive, like a cedar chest described as a “yawning trove” in “hues of tree flesh.” However, the collection’s more experimental side may dissuade some readers from journeying further into the book.

A heartfelt, humanist poetry collection that wears its eco-activism on its sleeve.