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-- To Sing An Octave Above the PastMarge Piercy says, "Ruth Daigon's work is a long drink of cold crystalline spring water." In a world where so many poems are of the moment, it is pure pleasure to encounter Ms. Daigon's work. Once an concert soprano who sang at Dylan Thomas' funeral and worked on Renaissance music with W.H. Auden, she brings everything she knows about the music of language to her poetry. No tin ear here. Daigon's world is one where a woman bathes/ in miles of wind with milk-/ white linen to wick her dry or listens to domestic static/ of fat sizzling on skillets or one who finds herself on the brink of everything she does not know. Here time is measured by the coffee rings staining the table top, by the way stars in their contrapuntal stutter/ litter the sky, or by a voice that declares, Before hours burn to ash, we'll wrap ourselves/in wind, in raw strips of light/ our bodies wild as vines. As a lyric poet, she's one of our finest. The poems are lush and beautiful. Reading them, we savor phrases such as birds/ blading against the horizon or love spins its web in a wind/ anchored in thorns.
Ms. Daigon looks with unflinching eyes at the rigors of the past where her
dead are growing old. She speaks of love and lost love and of the darkness
of approaching death. She offers love poems to her parents, aunts and
uncles, her husband, her sons, to friends in the gray solfeggio of autumn.
There are love poems to the earth, too, where Light cartwheels into morning
or where water tries its music under air's loose skin. Everywhere her sense
of the romance and beauty of the past is intertwined with a refreshing
toughness and irony, a willingness to move beyond the personal and domestic
to consider the world at-large be it the plight of 19th century American
immigrants, the burden of the Holocaust, or tragedies of contemporary Kosovo;
and she tells us of these things without sentimentality or bitterness.
This, Ruth Daigon's fifth volume of poetry, is distinguished particularly by
many long, surreal poems such as "The Drowning," "A Scent Of Blood,"
"Crosscutting the Years," or the very moving "Somewhere In Another Country." These poems are other-worldly yet grounded in telling detail. Whether they are about carpentry, animal life, or the life of the artist, they immerse us in strange rapture, draw us from stanza to stanza. They tells us things that are honest and fresh, inform us not only about Ms. Daigon's life but about ours. Ruth Daigon is a poet who combines the lyric of Gerard Manley Hopkins with the
modern economy of language and sensibility of Elizabeth Bishop. She's a wise
woman who is brave enough to be vulnerable, to confront herself and share
with us what she has learned.
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