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.

AUTHOR

Tammy Armstrong

Tammy Armstrong grew up in St. Stephen, New Brunswick and lived in Vancouver, BC for several years, where she earned a BA and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. She currently lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Armstrong has two books of poetry published with Anvil Press: ‘Unravel’ and ‘Bogman’s Music’ (a Governor General’s Literary Award nominee). Her poems have appeared in the following publications: ‘The Antigonish Review’, ‘Event’, ‘The Fiddlehead’, ‘Grain’, ‘The Malahat Review’, ‘Pottersfield Portfolio’, ‘Prairie Fire’, ‘Room of One’s Own’, ‘subTerrain’, ‘TickleAce’, and ‘Zygote’. “A Proper Burial for Song Birds” placed third in the League of Canadian Poets’ National Poetry Contest, Vintage 2000. “If In a Marriage to a Car Salesman” and “Clam Bake 1974” were performed on International Women’s Day 2000 at the National Art Gallery.

Reviews

The Scare in the Crow races across the back roads like a muscle car making a beer run. Then it pauses, in haunting contemplation of a walk through the woods. Armstrong’s poems inhabit the fantasia of this world — in the peculiarities of taxidermy, crowds watching a house wash away in a spring flood, old tombstones cast over a riverbank, or rumours of a sighting of the extinct eastern panther. Gothic shadows of dead friends and strangers inhabit the lost cause of failing farms and industries, eroding communities, children dispersed, the names of distant cousins slipping through loose fingers.

With blistering wit, Armstrong invites us to laugh at the zaniness of life. From moments of melancholy emerges an unflinching gaze at people who cling to life and livelihood the only way they know how. And always, she senses the pulse of the natural world — beautiful, transformative, and populated with the perceptions of animal minds.

“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.”
– Prairie Fire Review of Books