"Some things I say are prayers and others/ poems. I tell you now that I don't know/ the difference." In this posthumous collection, Digges (Trapeze) visits subjects she's already touched on in her other volumes: love, family, youth and aging, and loss-especially loss. These explorations are not redundant but necessary. In poems both haunting and penetrating, she deals with the death of both her husband and her brother. She considers her own existence: "Who made me who I am," she states rather than asks at one point. Yet these poems are also full of memorable images and sly humor. Digges plays with the idea of dance in terms not only of syntax but of topics: dolphins, escaped as the result of a hurricane, are seen "dancing anyway until they find their wildness and forget." In one poem, the poet dances with seven veils; in another, she dances with Ralph Waldo Emerson-her first love, she says. In some, she even dances with the idea of her own demise. "I want the dark back, the bloody well of it,/ my face before the fire,/ or lie alone on the cold stone and find a way/ to sleep awhile, wake clear and wander." This book of poems is highly recommended for readers of contemporary poetry and especially those interested in women's studies.
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