Rough Music

by Deborah Digges

"Deborah Digges's rough new music is bold and fractious, unpredictable and passionate. spilling over with ardor and grief. Everything in the path of her rapturous attention is swept up into a poetry we've never heard before, lifted and burnished to a wild splendor. Rough Music is a fierce, headlong book, so exhilarating that even its darkest notes shine with a strange joy."

-- Mark Doty

This is Deborah Digges's third book of poems and her best. Her first, Vesper Sparrows, won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; her second, Late in the Millennium, garnered great critical praise. Mona Van Duyn said, "She takes a giant step of the imagination from a fine first book to this, in which, with inspired concision, disparate images and details are yoked together to draw us through a rich, human 'story' whose closure often leaves us gasping with both surprise and grateful consent."

This new collection is strong and sometimes bitter work in which we can sense behind the facades of the poems the "human 'story'" to which Mona Van Duyn refers.

Genres: Poetry

54 pages, Hardcover

First published September 19, 1995

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was introduced to Deborah Digges by poet Joanne Diaz who teaches at Illinois Wesleyan University who mentioned Digges during a reading. I enjoyed Joanne Diaz so I looked into Digges.

Deborah Digges was a keen observer, as evidenced by so many lines in this book, and capable of writing exquisite lines such as:
"As for the sky above the water, it swallows language,
the way wind can carry off a voice." (from The Story of the Lighthouse)

One of the things I often wonder when reading poetry is the question of audience. Digges' poetry can be difficult, her Notes in the back of the book valuable. I would guess she wrote for a small audience. Yet, I want to read more of her work.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first encountered Deborah Digges’ work through her poem “My Amaryllis,” which appeared in one of The Best American Poetry anthologies. The sound quality in the poem, the way she used slant, internal and end rhyme to great effect, made it a habitually readable poem, one that I enjoyed hearing out loud over and over again. Even its subject was secondary to its aural enjoyment, though it is unique as well, with its hopeful message of sexual awakening later in life. So, when I found this collection in my local used book store, in which this poem appears, I picked it up and put it on my shelf for future reading, with high expectations for its content. On the whole, I was not disappointed. Digges is a highly proficient writer whose craft as a free-verse poet is obviously well practiced and developed. Most of this collection explores metaphysical relationships between nature, humans and a spirit-world that contains the ghosts of old lovers, lost children and various other muses. The poems’ topics gripped me to varying degrees, but I was continuously impressed with her vocabulary and the way she houses words in interesting syntactical configurations.

There was only one major shortcoming to the collection: the constant barrage of long, single-stanza, free-verse poems that constitute most of the work collected here. I noticed how thick and exhausting it can be as a reader when page after page of poems are in the same form and almost the same length. By about three-quarters through the book, I found myself drifting and uninterested as I began each poem until something in it particularly struck me. I was numb to the expectation that is set-up by the poem’s presence on the page because they all appeared the same.

Overall, I’m glad to be more familiar with her work and will look for other collections of hers to read in the future.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There is a sadness older than its texts
that will outlive the language,
like the lover who takes you by the roots of your hair.
In this way I was awake, I was light,
I grew lighter,
though I had not yet been lifted.” — “Chekhov’s Darling”

[Mills College Library]

811.54 D573r 1996