“These poems transport me. . . .With them Armitage has earned an even more prominent place in Texas literature.” –WF Strong, Stories from Texas: Some of Them Are True
“Armitage knows the landscape as intimately as the face of a beloved ancestor. .. .These poems will stay with the reader, evocative of the uncluttered country where the human heart’s tangled wilderness can find space, distance, peace.”–Kathryn Jones, author of An Orchid’s Guide to Life
Back home from Las Cruces to Vega, Texas in time to see the last iris in my front yard. I miss the cycle of flowers now that I live part of the year in New Mexico. Beginning with the first crocuses through the daffodils and tulips to iris, wild roses, day lilies, and varieties of roses and finally xeriscape plants, the old yard reveals its previous owners love who planted perennials, beginning in 1920 when the house was built. They’ve weathered all...
Thinking today about the original title for the memoir, “A Habit of Landscape.” The title was gently nudged aside by editors at University of Oklahoma Press for the more precise and seemingly rooted, “Walking the Llano.” I did walk the llano, at least a tiny bit of it, but as I write in the Superstitions memoir, it was in a effort to be more deeply rooted, to more deeply inhabit a place. Habit and habitat share a root themselves: “it dwells.” Maybe I’ll use that title for...
