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.
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"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
Tammy Armstrong is the youngest narrative poet ever to be shortlisted for the Governor-General's award. Raised in the border town of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Armstrong has lived in Vancouver, Halifax, and Fredericton, and travelled extensively in Europe, Mexico and Central America. Armstrong's writing appears frequently in Canadian and international literary magazines. A version of Bogman's Music, her first poetry collection, won the Alfred Bailey poetry prize, and was later a finalist for the Governor General's Award for poetry. Armstrong has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and has worked as an ESL instructor and waitress. She lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
