Northerners

In James Armstrong's pellucid poetry the drifting of autumn leaves shares space with the baroque architecture of nineteenth century England. A woman peruses a book of pharmaceuticals in a coffee shop looking for hints of happiness. And a naked woman wearing hip boots stares out of the 1940s in a photograph hung in a Michigan bar. Twilight is always moving the shadows of our urban lives out toward the country, our inherited past, where a deer or a heron waits like an angel glimpsed through the fog. Armstrong's poems elucidate the mystery and beauty of borders- temporal and historical, as well as geographical- while his pastoral sensibility floods our senses with images of the natural world, seemingly stopping time, edifying us, and helping us-for a few moments anyway-to transcend our enervated contemporary lives. Reading this book is like diving into a deep lake. It cleanses the soul.