Monument in a Summer Hat

Poetry. In James Armstrong's pellucid poetry the drifting of autumn leaves shares space with the baroque architecture of nineteenth century England. A woman peruses a book of pharmaceuticals in a coffee shop looking for hints of happiness. And a naked woman wearing hip boots stares out of the 1940s in a photograph hung in a Michigan bar. Twilight is always moving the shadows of our urban lives out toward the country, our inherited past, where a deer or a heron waits like an angel glimpsed through the fog. Armstrong's poems elucidate the mystery and beauty of borders—temporal and historical, as well as geographical—while his pastoral sensibility floods our senses with images of the natural world, seemingly stopping time, edifying us, and helping us—for a few moments anyway—to transcend our enervated contemporary lives. Reading this book is like diving into a deep lake. It cleanses the soul.