This breathtaking collection of poems by Deborah Digges, published posthumously, brings us rich stories of family life, nature’s bounty, love, and loss—the overflowing of a heart burdened by grief and moved by beauty.When Deborah Digges died in the spring of 2009, at the age of fifty-nine, she left this gathering of poems that returns to and expands the creative terrain we recognize as hers. Here are poems thatbring to life her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children...

These lush, rewarding reflections on a woman’s passage into midlife are grounded in our intimacy with nature and mortality. Deborah Digges, now in her fifties, looks back in such poems as “Boat” to see younger mothers and their children, and ponders her own “brilliant, trivial unmooring.” As she wanders from the garden to the barn and into the woods, she finds her moods mirrored in the calendar of the seasons, making lush music of the materials at hand and accepting the seismic changes in ...

Stephen Digges is the kind of angry adolescent a lot of parents would have given up on. He is out of control by the time he is 13 -- running with gangs, stealing cars, fooling around with drugs and guns, and in general making his family’s life hell. Confronted with his growing recklessness and defiance, his mother, the poet Deborah Digges, decides to try to accept Stephen on his own terms--a course that stuns her family and leads to the breakup of her second marriage. Digges “shadows” him ...

'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.' Eavan Boland, Irish Times'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Su...

Diane Ackerman's poems reveal her intense response to the several worlds of nature, science, and society. Her lyricism fuses wit and sobriety, meditation and activism, and she confronts us with figures both real and fantastic.As always, her strong connection with the natural world, the realms of language and literature, myth and imagination, combines with her deep understanding of the sciences to offer her readers a singular American voice. This is not a voice crying in the wildern...

For poet Mary Oliver, nature is full of mystery and miracle. From the excitation of birds in the sky to the flowers and plants that are "the simple garments" of the earth, the natural world is her text of both the earth's changes and its permanence.In Blue Iris, Mary Oliver collects ten new poems, two dozen of her poems written over the last two decades, and two previously unpublished essays on the beauty and wonder of plants. The poet considers roses, of course, as well a...

In his debut chapbook of poetry, Saeed Jones walks on the periphery of the South, those places on the outskirts of town, in bars after midnight, and on dangerous backroads where most people keep their heads down or look the other way. Through Texas and Tennessee, Alabama and the riverbeds of the Mississippi, these poems wrap themselves in cloaks of masks and comfort; garments we learn are flammable if we stand too close to flames. D. A. Powell says of Saeed's work, "Like Aeneas carrying hi...

An inventive and observant collection of lyric poems from the Princeton Series of Contemporary PoetsWith skillful rhetoric and tempered lyricism, the poems in A Glossary of Chickens explore, in part, the struggle to understand the world through the symbolism of words. Like the hens of the title poem, Gary J. Whitehead's lyrics root around in the earth searching for sustenance, cluck rather than crow, and possess a humble majesty.Confronting subject...

From a stone to fireflies, from childhood to growing old, Brian Swann’s poems contemplate the moments and individual objects that create a whole life and our relationship to them.There is a clearing by a certain stonewhere images flow and are worth stopping for.I have stayed there almost all day in silenceuntil night remembered what belonged to itand its shadows started to take back its own.I’ve found it hard to walk away as starl...

“One of the finest poets of the last fifty years.” —Saltto the Nth, like the truth of an endingunskeined across the crust of the white field.Though it happened only once, Iam sending the thoughtof the thoughtcontinuing.To return tothe field before the mowing.When a goldfinch swayedon a blue stem stalk,and the wind and the sunstirred the hay.—from “After t...

These poems span the gamut of life from love to death; a eulogy for a people, who for the most part, are no longer with us. Their evolution in rural Newfoundland has taken hundreds of years and there is a good possibility that we will never see their likes again. Full of knowledge, self-sufficiency, independence, pride and dignity, most of them, I think, would be deeply insulted by some of our contemporary characterizations of them. One could easily argue that this collection is a portraya...

This book is broken up into seasons. The imagery and content of the poems in the season reflect elements of the season. The best of which are In Quiet Moments, Hurricane Sandy, Endurance, Oblivion, and Fragment. Most of the poetry of this collection reflects the woodlands and coasts of Massachusetts, with a few set in Salem. Some of the poetry as well will involve the elements of fantasy, which may appeal to younger audiences. As with my last collection, there are snippets of reality and e...