A Habit of Landscape - by Shelley Armitage (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Habit of Landscape celebrates the convergent meanings of habit and habitat. each sharing the words "to dwell." These poems hold sensate moments-family experiences, inner revelations, transformative places. A realized kinship between the human and natural worlds signals the inclusiveness of place. Not something "out there," this shared space-personal or global- often surprises in the poem's turn. Like flash narratives these poems contain worlds in the vibrating fabric of the instant- forgotten, dismissed, previously unseen. Whether an elegy for a brother, an encounter with a pronghorn, or the whispers surrounding adoption, these lyric pieces speak to the sacrality of the moment.

Review Quotes

Shelley Armitage's poems hold and withhold, gathering artifacts and tracing the demarcations of landscape and life-barbed wire, schist, igneous escarpments, a cellar's dirt walls-while also acknowledging what cannot be contained, nor ever secured by words. To do the work of "ancestral ecology," she roots and uproots, considering what might be salvaged by "looking/in a world wound down."

-Christopher Bakken

Shelley Armitage is a poet aware of mythmaking-of the way we all fill the inexplicable with figures of the imagination. In her poems, she makes a world of presence, of the actual, of the body. She lives inside and celebrates the earthly condition of humanness, of being a thinking animal. A Habit of Landscape is a wonderous collection that reminds us of states of being so fundamental they can only be described as holy.

-Juliet Patterson, Threnody

Crisply vivid, witty, and at once far-seeing and a-whisper with intimacies, Armitage's poems are a rare and splendid pleasure. Above all, she reminds us to use the heart to see, to hear, to sing, even unto antelopes, baby foxes, rocks. Hers is a Texas that shimmers and leaves an afterglow.

-C.M. Mayo, author of Meteor