From a Sandstone Ledge: Poems by Shelley Armitage

As a daughter of the Llano Estacado, Shelley Armitage knows the landscape as intimately as the face of a beloved ancestor.  Far from “featureless,” as early explorers described the saffron sea of grass, the llano and its sandstone ledges serve as a perspective for the poet to explore what lies beneath the surface. These are poems that will stay with the reader, evocative of the uncluttered country where the human heart’s tangled wilderness can find space, distance, and peace.

–Kathryn Jones, author of An Orchid’s Guide to Life

Sit for a while with Shelley Armitage on this sandstone ledge and listen for the song of wind through strings drawn taught between place and past and poet.  She speaks for many of us children of the llano.

–Jerry L. Rogers, Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places, (Ret.), and author So Long For Now: A Sailor’s Letters from the USS Franklin

Shelley Armitage’s poetry reminds me of Larry McMurtry had he been a poet.  These poems transport me.  Suddenly I am ten again and herding a wayward calf back toward the barn through a mott of mesquites.  On the crosswind, I can smell my mom’s King Ranch Casserole baking at the house.  With these poems, Armitage has earned an even more prominent place in Texas Literature.

–WF Strong, Stories from Texas:  Some of Them Are True

Poetry is an art of freedom because it liberates us from time and space and body just long enough, as Shelley Armitage writes in From a Sandstone Ledge, to “look back . . . to see where we have been,” even as we move forward. As these poems demonstrate– recording for ourselves and others the many flickering beauties of place and nature and family–we can, as we age, still return to, carry forward, and sing again.

–Laurence Musgrove, A Stranger’s Heart