Rough Music

Rough Music by Digges, Deborah. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780679441762.

"Deborah Diggess 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 weve 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 Diggess 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.