POET

Deborah Digges (1950 - 2009)

BIOGRAPHY

In her collection of poems Late in the Millennium, Deborah Lea Digges recounts her early childhood. Digges uses the imagery of nature in her lyrical poems to probe for feelings and emotions. A Publishers Weekly reviewer contended that in this collection, Digges's "sharp eye captures the paradoxes of existence."

In Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the '50s and '60s, Digges ventured into autobiography. In this book, she chronicles her childhood growing up in Missouri. She describes her frustration with the gender roles of the day and details how she found freedom in the 1960s when she was able to develop her own identity. According to a Chicago Tribune reviewer, Digges "produces tones, shades and images that are precise, crisp, and evocative."

Rough Music, a collection of poems by Digges that was published in 1995, combines images of contemporary life with the rituals of ancient times. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that the poems are most powerful when Digges is remembering an old love, or inquiring into the mysteries of her body. The reviewer praised the work, commenting that Digges "writes a learned, often densely allusive verse . . . [that] deserve[s]—and apply reward[s]—the reader's careful attention."

The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy's Adolescence is a portrait of Digges's younger son, Stephen, called "a hell-raiser of mythic proportions" by Emily Fox Gordon in the New York Times. Stephen, a frustrated, gifted, and alienated teen, shook Digges's complacency and filled her with questions. In search of answers, she follows him out at night, secretly observing him and his gang friends as they spray graffiti on a wall; she describes an essay he wrote about his older brother; and she shares her conflict and confusion about how to deal with him. Gordon described the book as "thought-provoking and intermittently beautiful," and in Booklist, John Green remarked that it is "a wrenching memoir . . . written with a poet's eye for resonant images."

CAREER

Writer and poet.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vesper Sparrows (poems), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1986.
Late in the Millennium (poems), Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.
Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the '50s and '60s (memoir), Knopf (New York, NY), 1992.
Rough Music (poems), Knopf (New York, NY), 1995.
(Editor and translator with Mairym Cruz-Bernal) Ballad of the Blood: The Poems of Maria Elena Cruz Varela, Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1996.
The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy's Adolescence, photographs by Stephen Digges, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2001.