Monument in a Summer Hat (New Issues Press Poetry Series) [Paperback]

James Armstrong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1999 | Series: New Issues Press Poetry Series

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 comtemporary lives.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Armstrong has the gift of creating figures ancient and allegorical, making of their posture and gesture--figured and disfigured--a meditation on human time. His historical intelligence and visionary power render image into emblems that bear witness to attrition, while reinstating the dignity with which so many centuries of human thought and action, even error and evil, have endowed them. These are, in every sense, memorable poems. -- Eleanor Wilner

In Monument in a Summer Hat, James Armstrong's splendid first book of poems, we discover a poet of high craftsmanship, great learning, and a benign, almost classical intellect addressing himself, with a fine eloquence, to the quiet life of provincial surroundings. When I think of the character of this work, I am reminded of those Chinese governors of the T'ang, eloquent poets of fine, metaphysical minds, sent eastward into the deep interiors of wild, barbaric lands far from the gentle capital of civilization, sending their beautifully considered, mildly expressed, but profoundly sorrowful missives to this eternity that is literature. The poet James Armstrong is no less a civil governor of wild, metaphysical lands--a dutiful servant of our American eternity. -- Garrett Hongo

James Armstrong blends a haiku-like clarity with classical austerity, all the while yearning, in poem after poem, for that primal world in which fragility might have time to grow strong. His is a first book whose essential gravity is lightened by freshness and charm. -- Mary Kinzie

About the Author

James Armstrong grew up in Portage, Michigan and has lived in Boston and Chicago. His poems have appeared in Triquarterly, Gulf Coast, Orion, The Snowy Egret, and elsewhere. He has a Ph.D. in American Literature from Boston University and has taught English and Creative Writing at Nothwestern University and in the MFA program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1996 he was awarded the PEN-New England Discovery Prize for Poetry, and in 1999 he received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in poetry. Armstrong is currently an assistant professor of English at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

Product Details

• Paperback: 53 pages
• Publisher: New Issues Pr; 1st edition (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0932826784
• ISBN-13: 978-0932826787
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,251,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous, December 18, 1999

By 

M. Johnson (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Monument in a Summer Hat (New Issues Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Though my daily reading fare tends to be along the quotidian lines of Upside and Industry Standard magazines, this book of poems gripped me. Armstrong's sometimes delightful, other times wistful juxtapositions of place and time will leave you at awe with wonder. He manages to capture in print the nature of thought--serendipitous yet connected-up, flighty yet rooted. It's fine and sophisticated work, yet never arrogantly inaccessible. Henry James would appreciate this poet's keen sensitivity to the workings of the mind; Thoreau would praise his attunedness to the world that plays upon our senses.

You won't go wrong with this one. In fact, give a copy to all those people you know who spend too much time reading Upside and Industry Standard--Armstrong's poems breath calm and perspective into the craze of silicon life.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Debut of a Remarkable Poet, March 2, 2000

By 

Emily L. Hiestand (Cambridge, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Monument in a Summer Hat (New Issues Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)

This is a buoyant, wise, and witty book, a record of wrestling with powerful forces that sculpt our lives, among them order and chaos, time and history, desire, locality and land.

"Monument In A Summer Hat" is not only brilliant, it is a delight. The poems have wonderful music: of "scantling light" and "neon scripture," a night that "presses her migrant face against the glass," of trees that hiss silver. In the jazz world, this poet's counterpart might be Marian McPartland. Armstrong's language has the balance of elegance and edge, emotion and intelligence that marks McPartland's memorable keyboard. Such equilibrium is a dynamic state, and Armstrong's "Saltwater Snails," for example, is a small masterpiece about how to move through a world in which uncertainty is "the first rule of order."

Armstrong has an eye for the absurd and haunting tones of our age (women pondering psycho-pharmaceuticals in the Café Triste; a crew of migrant leaf-blowers who arrive like a "divine wind"), but he is never curmudgeonly. His chosen tools are the more creative and compassionate ones: wryness, patience, wit, and scrupulous attention. He can also be very funny; "Meditations" is a hilarious, moving portrait of the tussles of Mind and Body. There is a benevolence and honesty in this language which give some of the poems a nearly ceremonial feel. Cumulatively, the poems of Monument offer a rich set of proposals about how to be.

Here, the American provincial landscape of small town barrooms, barns, and hilltop prospects are proper places for contemplation, and Armstrong's poems about place are among the most penetrating in his book. Monument In A Summer Hat opens with "Granted," a poem that acknowledges the "terror of this age," and states a faith in the moisture and steadiness of the earth itself. Emblems of frontier, forest, and deer are rescued from nostalgic amber, are precise and factual strokes in an eerie American scene, a disjointed culture in which an older world ghosts about rooms, stares glassily from the walls.

The natural world that Armstrong encounters is a source of a quiet and ongoing abandon, and his television poem, "Dump," seizes the chance of a found image--a cast-off television tube being slowly entwined by vines--to play with the tension between the organic and technological realms. "Leaf Blowers"--a characteristic appeal to proportion--locates the human within a vast aliveness, an order beyond the specifically human world. Elsewhere, Armstrong relishes that fact that, although the mass media's lines "suture every hamlet to the national ear"--"no field is uniform from the air," and "furrows trace purely local contours." Like Horace, Armstrong is an urbane lover of nature who moves fluently across temporal and geographical space.

The occasion of an airplane trip gives Armstrong a perch from which to meditate on abstraction and specificity, on the global and local. It is telling that even when cruising at 30,000 feet, Armstrong stays grounded, locating his metaphysics in the corporeal, plying a reader with sensory detail: "a blue tile in a little Portuguese chapel," "an angel in stiff garments," "the haybale swagger of Autumn." He states his preference clearly in "After Rilke:" "The soul grows heavy from the / irritants in paradise, / and falls of its own specificity / into the gutter." Here is a poet who feels the breath of the absolute, but who, even in extremis, throws in his lot with the particularities of our world. His Christ on the cross thinks "not of the silver towers of Paradise," but of "his mother's garden in Nazareth, a sunny patch by the wall where butterflies hovered above the melon blossoms."

The limits and borders of language also fascinate this poet: his "Heron" is a portrait of a mute, yet eloquent "blue messenger," and "The Language" is rueful about what we shrink from saying, what we ask floral emmisaries to convey on our behalf.

Perhaps one reason Armstrong is so alive to life's abundance is precisely because he has acknowleged the tragic dimension of life, the "way of sorrows." Among the most poignant poems in this collection are those about time, and the passing of time. We like the past, Armstrong says, because it has "dwindled to a purer form." In "Time" (for L.), he suffuses time with sorrow and desire, likens love to a gentle ruler. Graceful as a minuet in its music and tone, this is a grown-up account of how our loves tell time, how the blessed weight of love shadows each heartbeat. And, in "Omnia Vincit Amor," Armstrong muses that after passion is spent "Time re-enters the clocks" and one is left with only one god, "the bleak one, the one with the hammer." (That would be Hephaestus, the lame smith, with his ringing hammer of craft; and what a moving observation to find in a poetry suffused with the power and pleasures of craft.)

"Monument In A Summer Hat" marks the debut of a remarkable poet, one steeped in history, with a vision all his own.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Bright Beginning, April 7, 2000

By 

O. Lund (Winona,, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Monument in a Summer Hat (New Issues Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)

James Armstrong, in his _Monument in a Summer Hat__, makes an impressive debut. Intellectual without being pedantic, classical without being pretentious, his well-crafted poems are profound in their depth but accessible. His major theme here is the opposition of nature to civilization, nature consistently being the victor, as Armstrong criticizes the mercenary, utilitarian, quick-pop-psych-fix tendencies of our modern world at the expense of our more spiritual impulses. At times reminiscent of Stevens in his profundity but rooted in the the concrete quotidian, the collection has many strong poems, my personal favorite being "Paradise."