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Vesper sparrows
Book by Digges, Deborah
- GenresPoetry
51 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 19, 2008
Deborah Digges, Vesper Sparrows (Atheneum, 1986)
Every year at CWRU's book sale's box day (five bucks a box, as big a box as you can carry), I manage to grab myself fifteen or twenty books of poetry. Of them, one or two are absolute keepers, the kind of books I spend my whole life searching for. Box day has produced such collection-worthy books as David St. John's Study for the World's Body and Debra Allbery's Walking Distance; add to those Deborah Digges' first collection of poetry, 1986's Vesper Sparrows. Vesper Sparrows won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award the year after its release, and has recently been reissued by Carnegie-Mellon's Classic Contemporary Poetry series. Both kudos are very well deserved.
Digges treads, but never crosses, the most oft-abused line in poetry. You have to dig for the deeper meanings, but not too far, and what's on the surface is easily visualized and understood. Digges balances the tightrope perfectly, never falling off either to the "tell don't show" side or the "show, but don't give us enough to figure it out" side (which has been popular with the Pulitzer and Nobel committees for far too long-have YOU tried puzzling out some of the stuff in Jorie Graham's last book?).
"Then Greenfield became synonymous with Heaven
in all the hymns my mother sang, hour
by chained hour. Greenfield, the rhythm
of my father's boots on linoleum
when he came in late, went out again looking.
Greenfield, that secret destination
I didn't know enough to grieve..."
("Mimosa")
Exquisite.
Every year at CWRU's book sale's box day (five bucks a box, as big a box as you can carry), I manage to grab myself fifteen or twenty books of poetry. Of them, one or two are absolute keepers, the kind of books I spend my whole life searching for. Box day has produced such collection-worthy books as David St. John's Study for the World's Body and Debra Allbery's Walking Distance; add to those Deborah Digges' first collection of poetry, 1986's Vesper Sparrows. Vesper Sparrows won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award the year after its release, and has recently been reissued by Carnegie-Mellon's Classic Contemporary Poetry series. Both kudos are very well deserved.
Digges treads, but never crosses, the most oft-abused line in poetry. You have to dig for the deeper meanings, but not too far, and what's on the surface is easily visualized and understood. Digges balances the tightrope perfectly, never falling off either to the "tell don't show" side or the "show, but don't give us enough to figure it out" side (which has been popular with the Pulitzer and Nobel committees for far too long-have YOU tried puzzling out some of the stuff in Jorie Graham's last book?).
"Then Greenfield became synonymous with Heaven
in all the hymns my mother sang, hour
by chained hour. Greenfield, the rhythm
of my father's boots on linoleum
when he came in late, went out again looking.
Greenfield, that secret destination
I didn't know enough to grieve..."
("Mimosa")
Exquisite.
August 31, 2024
I'm so glad I read this. I feel a deep affection for Digges now; you really get a sense of who she was and her humanity from this collection. I was moved to tears at least once. She evokes humility, a sense of awe, and connection with humanity in her reader. I feel so close to her, and it probably helps that she discusses the topics I spend a lot of time wrestling with so beautifully. A less important thing that I really loved is her ability to talk about nature, science, disease, evolution in such a powerful (and to my untrained eye) original and personal way. Thank you Deborah Digges! This and the Tagore collection I read last month I think have helped me to finally begin to understand the power of poetry.
October 30, 2020
I'm so glad I read this. I feel a deep affection for Digges now; you really get a sense of who she was and her humanity from this collection. I was moved to tears at least once. She evokes humility, a sense of awe, and connection with humanity in her reader. I feel so close to her, and it probably helps that she discusses the topics I spend a lot of time wrestling with so beautifully. A less important thing that I really loved is her ability to talk about nature, science, disease, evolution in such a powerful (and to my untrained eye) original and personal way. Thank you Deborah Digges! This and the Tagore collection I read last month I think have helped me to finally begin to understand the power of poetry.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews