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Take Us Quietly is Tammy Armstrong's third collection of poetry, and it speaks to the significance of the quotidian, of inhabiting and of human relationships. Many of its poems deal in the domestic, drawing images from homes past and present, but one never gets the sense that images and details are included solely because of their proximity. Whether the setting of a poem is a Guatemalan village or a Fredericton apartment building, the subject matter is presented with a sensitivity to imaginative potential that allows a flower in a Canadian Tire store to be as interesting as the red light district of Amsterdam. Armstrong has a knack for choosing fresh topics for her poetry - from the mythical El Chupacabra goat-sucker, to the chimps that were used as test subjects in Soviet and American space programs; from a long-lost half-brother, to the scientist/artist who plasticizes human bodies for display - the best of these poems engage by means of the originality of their content, even where the execution could be improved.

The poet's treatment of the foreign is, for the most part, sensitive and respectful. In a world that runs increasingly on western economic models and language, the artist's task of registering traditional values, customs and even landscape is increasingly important. Armstrong's poetic speaker recognizes her separateness from the foreign in such poems as "An Illness": "on the plastic seats at the clinic / I cannot claim observer, tourist / beside the child with a monkey bite." In respectfully recording the customs and geography of elsewhere, however, she contributes to their preservation. Pieces like "El Chupacabra," "Indonesian Corners," and "Panajachel, Guatemala" celebrate cultural difference instead of seeking only what is common, the "us in them." Take Us Quietly makes a play for a cosmopolitan poetics.

Armstrong's tone and approach to content, however, are not always so fresh and poised. Informing her project is a strong sense of compassion for animals and for people of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds. Most often, her tone indicates a sophisticated understanding of the world and its cultures, but sometimes this sophistication moves past compassion to condescension, as in "Rogersville: Garage Man's Daughter Back From the City" with its stock-characterization of the "grease-stamped" garage man. The poet's compassion can also push her poems dangerously close to sentimentality when she gives a voice to exploited animals. She apostrophizes creatures such as rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, dogfish and chimps, giving them serious treatment and invariably sounding an ecopoetic note. While these explorations often shed light on the increasingly difficult cohabitation of humans and animals, the poems sometimes devolve into the maudlin, as in "Dogfish," where "a mallet [is] not punishment enough" to satisfy sadistic fishermen.

Like her approach to content and voicing, Armstrong's versification is usually polished and interesting. Working mostly in short lyrics, she manages to strike an enjoyable balance between straightforward narrative and descriptive passages and more abstract or syntactically challenging ones. This smooth dialectic aids comprehension, and also creates pleasing tonal tensions, as in the pieces "Bike," "Azimuth" and "Mathematics." The poet is also deft at regulating the pace of the reader, often generating rich rhythms, as in "Landfill":

Off the industrial park
the seagulls are cut-twine kites
above landfill rafters,
the thermals that buff
mandarin bulldozers.

There is an energy in many of the poems that derives from the twisting of metaphor, of pushing image and analogy beyond what some poets might consider sufficient. In other words, Armstrong doesn't rest with a simple "A is B" formulation, but adds layer to layer, in a complex semantic string that can confuse, but often succeeds as in "That From a Body - a Conductor":

Carried past the caravans to clinic,
your body still smouldering ozone,
your language grounded in taproot
while raku muscles muttered ghazals
of watch-crystal precision -
a firewall, arterial swamped.

Again, in "Johnny Dark Shadow" metaphors accrue: "the rats parading behind the cats, dogs, roosters, / all leaving the old house stroke victim slouched, / all taking off for the back acre."

Clichés are few in the collection, but they do appear: for instance "how absolutely and completely / we become stilled in the end" ("Squirrel"), and "our thoughts have always run parallel" ("Where I Stand"). There is also a unfortunate shift toward moralizing at the end of some poems, as in "Rogersville: Garage Man's Daughter": "how foreign we seem / after years in the city," and the poem "Dogfish": "we all have a hunger to fill, / an oceanography unwritten." This moral glossing is all the more unfortunate because Armstrong, in this same collection, delivers some remarkable endings that pick up a previously ancillary image or idea and infuse it with new significance.