This is a buoyant, wise, witty book that looks closely at powerful forces that sculpt our lives, among them order and chaos, history, desire, locality, and land. Monument In A Summer Hat is also a delight. The poems have wonderful music: of "scantling light" and "neon scripture," of a night that "presses her migrant face against the glass," of trees that hiss silver. From the jazz world, this poet's counterpart might be Marian McPartland, whose keyboard is marked by elegance, edge, emotion, and intelligence. Such equilibrium is a dynamic state, and Armstrong's "Saltwater Snails," for example, is a small masterpiece about how to move through a world in which uncertainty is "the first rule of order."
Armstrong has an eye for the absurd and haunting tones of our age (women pondering psychopharmaceuticals in the Café Triste; a crew of migrant leaf-blowers who arrive like a "divine wind"), but he is never curmudgeonly. His chosen tools are more creative and compassionate ones: wryness, patience, wit, and scrupulous attention. He can also be very funny; "Meditations" is a hilarious, moving portrait of the tussles of mind and body. Cumulatively, the poems of Monument offer a worldview — a set of proposals about how to be. There is a benevolence and honesty in this language which give some of the poems a nearly ceremonial feel.
Here, the American provincial landscape of small town barrooms, barns, and hilltop prospects are proper places for contemplation, and Armstrong's poems about place are among the most penetrating in his book. Monument opens with "Granted," a poem that acknowledges the "terror of this age," and states faith in the steadiness of the earth itself. Emblems of frontier, forest, and deer are factual strokes in an eerie American scene, a culture in which an older world ghosts about rooms, stares glassily from the walls.
The natural world that Armstrong encounters is a source of a quiet and ongoing abandon, and his television poem, "Dump," seizes the chance of a found image — a cast-off television tube being slowly and surely entwined by vines — to play with the tension between the organic and technological realms. "Leaf Blowers," is a characteristic appeal to proportion, locating the human within a vast aliveness, an order beyond the specifically human world. Elsewhere, Armstrong relishes that fact that, although the mass media's lines "suture every hamlet to the national ear" — "no field is uniform from the air," and "furrows trace purely local contours." Like Horace, Armstrong is an urbane lover of nature, who moves fluently across temporal and geographical space.
The occasion of an airplane trip gives Armstrong an elevation from which to meditate on abstraction and specificity, on the global and local. It is telling that even when cruising at 30,000 feet, Armstrong stays grounded, locating his metaphysics in the corporeal, plying his readers with sensory detail: "a blue tile in a little Portuguese chapel," "an angel in stiff garments," "the haybale swagger of Autumn." He states his preference clearly in "After Rilke:" "The soul grows heavy from the / irritants in paradise, / and falls of its own specificity / into the gutter." Here is a poet who feels the breath of the absolute, but who, even in extremis, throws in his lot with the particularities of our world. His Christ on the cross thinks "not of the silver towers of Paradise," but of "his mother's garden in Nazareth, a sunny patch by the wall where butterflies hovered above the melon blossoms."
The limits, or borders, of language also fascinate this poet: his "Heron" is a portrait of a mute, yet eloquent "blue messenger," and "The Language" is rueful about what we shrink from saying, what we burden flowers to say on our behalf. Armstrong is alive to life's abundance even as he he acknowledges the tragic dimension of life, the "way of sorrows."
Among the most poignant poems in this collection are those about time, and the passing of time. We like the past, Armstrong says, because it has "dwindled to a purer form." In "Time," he suffuses time with sorrow and desire, likens love to a gentle ruler. Graceful as a minuet, this is a grown-up account of how love tells time, how the weight of love shadows each heartbeat. And, in "Omnia Vincit Amor," he muses that "Time re-enters the clocks" and one is left with only one god, "the bleak one, the one with the hammer." (That would be Hephaestus, the smith, with his ringing hammer of craft; and what a moving observation to find in a poetry suffused with the power and pleasures of craft.)
Monument In A Summer Hat marks the debut of a superb poet, steeped in history, and with a vision all his own.
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