Trapeze

by Deborah Digges

These lush, rewarding reflections on a woman’s passage into midlife are grounded in our intimacy with nature and mortality. Deborah Digges, now in her fifties, looks back in such poems as “Boat” to see younger mothers and their children, and ponders her own “brilliant, trivial unmooring.” As she wanders from the garden to the barn and into the woods, she finds her moods mirrored in the calendar of the seasons, making lush music of the materials at hand and accepting the seismic changes in her life with an appreciation for the incidental scraps of beauty she chances upon.

Throughout these luminous poems–which touch movingly on the illness and loss of her husband–Digges marvels at the brio with which we fling ourselves daringly into the

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the poetry of Deborah Digges is like a meditation, it takes me to another place....

[mark habishaw]

Khomeini
JvnnvMann
Uhh
Mmm
SONIC
F2f
Windmill
Mario

[Ba]

A beautiful poet. I learn what it means to actually use good metaphor. Cosmic and immediately identifiable way of writing

[Cc]

A beautiful poet. I learn what it means to actually use good metaphor. Cosmic and immediately identifiable way of writing

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a hard time marking poetry books as finished. When you read a novel you know when the story is complete, but poems get stuck in our head, demand to be revisited. Trapeze by Deborah Digges will be one of those oft revisited volumes. Such a magnificent talent for entangling words with mortality and meaning. Boat (p. 18) I recommend to my friend Roxane who took me kayaking for the first time. Trillium (p. 38) takes me back to my days in Wisconsin where meeting the dog's daily needs was sometimes the only reason I got up and where the trillium on the ferny hillsides rewarded me for the effort. Seersucker Suit (p. 14) a specific yet universal father/daughter poem. Also remarkable are the poems Telling the Bees (p.5), Becoming a Poet (p. 11) and the title poem Trapeze (p.10) which takes the poetic leap from the dying to "children on swings pumping higher and higher." and warning us "Don't call them back, don't call them for supper./See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky."

[Katlyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some difficult poems-- I can't say I got all of them-- but a rich and imaginative quality to them. Sometimes the connections were completely obtuse, I wanted to know where they came from, what was the association. "My life's calling," "So light you were I would have carried you," "Telling the Bees," "Gown of Moleskins" and "Raising the wooly mammoth" were among the memorable.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some wonderful, wonderful poems.

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

She is a gifted poet, her poems are well-crafted. Still, not many of them spoke to me as I'd hoped. I did really like Lilacs, Trapeze, and Ice Fishermen though. .

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely and timely(less)

[stephanie cassidy · Rating 5 out of 5]

yes, I've come back to you. I think I always will...