Blue Lash: Poems

by James Armstrong

In Blue Lash, James Armstrong explores the way a physical place can be alchemically transformed into mental geographies.

The world of Lake Superior comes alive and expands outward in these poems: cicadas "grind their teeth/under the blue roof of August"; a quartz pebble becomes "little knuckle/petrified egg/white as a wave-cap"; a Jet Ski "revs past the dock/like a demon out of Milton." Stripping away the layer of sentimentality...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1571314245
• ISBN13: 9781571314246
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.6" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Blue Lash: Poems

I found this to be a powerful expression of how one feels when in the presence of Lake Superior. I loved the simplicity and economy of the language. Lake Superior and its shore are not romantic and comforting. The lake is majestic and frightening. Mr. Armstrong's style captures the lake's essence.

Swift and clever poetic insights to life, death, love, beauty, and humanity

Blue Lash is an evocative collection of James Armstrong's metaphorical rhetoric laid out in poetic verse. Offering a clear and persuasive philosophical perspective, Blue Lash offers swift and clever poetic insights to life, death, love, beauty, and humanity. Lutheran Sea: One wave follows another/beneath the heel of the wind;/the spray blows landward,/but lacking salt or iodine/it smells oddly Protestant,/carrying the faintest tang/of wet iron,/well water/sluiced in a bucket/from a cabin you visited once/when you were a boy,/water that numbed the tongue/as if it had dripped/from a seam of ice,/blue and glistening,/in a cave/where nymphs of winter/with red fingers/preened before mirrors of frost,/dead cold sober.