Vesper Sparrows

Deborah Digges

Every year at box day, 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.