A Habit of Landscape

Shelley Armitage is an award-winning author, professor, and scholar of varied and wide-ranging talents, interests, and insights. Her books, essays, and articles run the gamut of genres and topics from poetry to biography, geography, cultural anthropology, memoir, history, chronicles of our changing landscape and climate, and more.

The twenty-eight poems in this most recent collection, A Habit of Landscape, are simply and beautifully formatted and arranged in three distinct sections, and while the collection has a shapely cohesion, the individual sections each have their own sense of belonging. The first nine poems bring a sense of nostalgia, of memory and artifact, images and relics of the author having come up in rural Texas and her intimate knowledge of that rugged landscape, its people, flora, and fauna:

Out on these dry plains there was a vision of paradise.
Taking these steps one more time, in this scarab of self,
I realize death is making one light enough to leave.
It’s not the weight of spirit that encumbers us,
but the load of our unshed skins.

The second section begins with “Cecil,” a moving poem about the popular African lion who was easily lured from a wild animal park in Zimbabwe by poachers because he had become so friendly with tourists.

King of beasts, the stalkers called him.
But in the end he was just plain Cecil:
Tufts of hair, tarnished mane, stilled bone
And gut after all. Nothing exotic.

The poems in this section are intriguing in their varied shapes and the use of different forms and story-telling modes. They evoke myths, first love, betrayal (both personal and universal), and the ways we wound one another, the earth, and the creatures that inhabit it, historically and in the more recent past.

The final section most ostensibly concerns death in various way, yet the title of the first poem—“What Beauty Does”—and the fact that the first several poems rhapsodize somewhat whimsically about trees ease us into the topic. In this group, I found one poem particularly moving. “Removal” is about a husband changing his wife’s name and thus erasing her from history such that the poem’s narrator could no longer find this ancestor:

The secret was to be passed from
mother to daughter, like a prayer.
Though I am adopted, still I long to hear
the whisper in the blood.

“Blue Heron” is the longest and last poem in the collection. It is also the poem from which the collection’s title comes:

5.
But still I come looking for you
and more: a habit of landscape
which says continuity,
which countenances the four-wheeler ruts
and your silence,
your disappearing act.

I don’t typically read much poetry but I’m glad I requested A Habit of Landscape to review. Likely it was the author’s biography that prompted me—her accomplishments and her interest in the natural environment. As a writer and reader, I found the collection powerful, poignant, and resonant. As a concerned citizen, mother, and grandmother, I found the topics vital and dealt with in ways that surprised and intrigued me.