The Scare in the Crow

As Tammy Armstrong rode horseback on a one-month sojourn in Iceland, up rose the ley lines that crosshatched the landscape — ancient tracks rife with saga, myth, and human history. In this collection, her poems both respond to W.H. Auden’s poetic travelogue, Letters from Iceland, and evoke her raw relationship to the native natural world of North America. In language that folds upon itself, chance sightings of wild creatures become a study of humanity before the animal that waits. In re-negotiating a space that includes other species and other life forms, Armstrong unbalances her perceptions, making her own space unfamiliar and finding new ways of conceiving of a less human-centred environment.

“Armstrong employs sound the way a surgeon employs a scalpel. And her eye for imagery is that of a jeweller as she polishes the facets of her poetic craft.” — John Herbert Cunningham, Prairie Fire Review of Books