This collection gives us a Texas that is still untamed, undeveloped, undisguised.  This is a place where past and present merge and being alive there makes the poet permanently a part of it.

Shelley Armitage grew up in the farming community of Vega, Texas.  She still owns the family farm and has made it one of her environmental projects.  As a child, she helped the family with farm chores; she still walks the farm roads and collects new insights. She is now Professor Emerita at the University of Texas at El Paso. Over her lifetime, she has published in many areas and won numerous awards, including the Southwest Book Award and the Emily Toth Award. Her love for the natural world and desire to preserve it animates much of her work–and her efforts on behalf of the land are both in words and in actions.

These poems explore the soul of her East Texas landscape.  The opening poem, “Llano Estacado,” gives the lie to the negative impressions of the first commentators: “featureless” (p. 1) and “the Great American Desert, a sea of grass” (p. 1). She replaces them with a pile-up of living images, which are intensified by the precision of her language.

Featureless? Creosote cholla gramma mesquite prickly pear

juniper and trust the pronghorn, themselves v

er

tical, to sniff out forbs bladderwort Mexican

buckeye acacia ironweed vervain daisies verbena crown

beard purslane panhandle grape vetch deer pea violet… (p. 2)

You can see and smell this “desert” and feel its life.

Unfamiliar with botany, I had to look up the terms in the poem title ‘Xylem and Phloem.”  They are vascular tissues that facilitate the transportation of water, minerals, and food throughout a plant. Of course, they are metaphoric in the poem, which is actually centered on four different-era rocking chairs created of the “maple walnut cedar ash” (p. 8) of the woods.  Sitting in them makes a living current flow through the speaker’s life, bringing back her childhood, adolescence, and other past experiences–connecting the woods, her family, and her individual sentience.

“To Make a Prairie” nods to the Emily Dickinson poem that begins with the same line. Emily did not require much to make her prairie–just a clover, a bee, and reverie– but Armitage does. This poem, like the others, reflects the selfhood of the place, but here the speaker is saddened by the incursions into this sacred space by what has gone, what “disappeared before knowing”… (p. 21)

What was

purple prairie clover, amaranth, yarrow,

…side oats gramma, blue stem,

buffalo gramma, purple ground cherry (p. 21)

yielding to

First, the over-grazing  then habitat

loss, no neighbors notice, opting for

widened, improved roads, electrical

towers, the steel will of development… (p.21)

This slim book invites multiple rereadings. I am only an adopted Texan, arriving in 1967 to be one of the few women instructors in the newly co-ed Texas A&M. The poems evoked some of my first memories of this place, coming down to live here from the North–passing through the Llano Estacado and experiencing Texas sights and sounds for the first time.  This collection makes me want to pass through it again, more slowly, taking time to sit on a sandstone ledge.  Despite Armitage’s “To Make a Prairie,” I bet it hasn’t changed all that much in the last 50 years.