Borzoi Reader | Authors | Deborah Digges


		Deborah Digges's first book of poems, Vesper Sparrows, has recently been reissued by Carnegie-Mellon Press in the Classic Contemporary Series. Her second collection, Late in the Millennium, was published in 1989. A memoir, Fugitive Spring, was published in 1992 and in paperback a year later. She has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has taught in the graduate writing divisions of New York, Boston, Iowa, and Columbia universities, and in the Vermont College Program. She currently lives in Massachusetts and is Associate Professor of English at Tufts University.


		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. Praise for ROUGH MUSIC "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