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 (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . / . . . / his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); and the moods of nature, which schooled her (“A tree will take you in, flush riot of needles light burst, the white pine / grown through sycamore”). Throughout, touching all subjects, either implicitly or explicitly, is the call to poetry itself. The final work from one of our finest poets, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a uniquely intimate collection, a sustaining pleasure that will stand to remind us of Digges’s gift in decades to come.

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Digges, Deborah

Poetry

KNOPF

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 her life with an appreciation for the incidental scraps of beauty she chances upon. Throughout these luminous poems–which touch movingly on the illness and loss of her husband–Digges marvels at the brio with which we fling ourselves daringly into the night: See how the first dark takes the city in its arms and carries it into what yesterday we called the future. O, the dying are such acrobats. Here you must take a boat from one day to the next, or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand. But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening, diving, recovering, balancing the air.

Trapeze

Parenting & Relationships

Now in paperback, the final, posthumous collection of poems by Deborah Digges: 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 captures a stunning gift that prevailed to the end. Here are poems that speak of her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children; the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood; the moods of nature; and throughout, touching all subjects, is the call to poetry itself.

Self-Help

Death & Grief

At the age of twelve, Deborah Digges's son Stephen was running in gangs, stealing cars, and bringing home guns. This is the story of the adolescence that followed, of a boy growing up quickly and aggressively, with unrestrainable energy and a flair for risky and outrageous behavior. It is his story, as told by his mother, who is intent on pulling together a family that can get her son through these years alive, not just undamaged but the better for them. In beautiful, vibrant prose, devoid of self-pity, anger, or blame, Deborah describes her struggle to understand and protect her son as his behavior escalates beyond her control. Even in the midst of the most harrowing experiences, Stephen's intelligence and sensitivity shine through: in an essay he writes about his older brother, in his photography, in his incisive explanations for his unruly activities, in his impulse to take care of those in worse shape than he is in. And as Stephen's misadventures take him into territory; emotional territory, but also actual neighborhoods Deborah has never encountered before, she tags along behind (sometimes literally, trailing him under cover of night) and teaches herself to understand how and why he acts, thinks, feels the way he does. Eventually, mother and son begin to rebuild their lives. A visit to a therapist who suggests they throw knives at a cardboard target proves surprisingly effective. Together, Deborah and Stephen take in a bizarre menagerie, including an unforgettable trio of dogs: Buster the epileptic bulldog; GQ, another bulldog, this one on Prozac; and Rufus, a basset hound who decides to raise a litter of motherless kittens. And, finally, Deborah and Stephen open their home to Trev, a friend of Stephen's abandoned by his family. Each new responsibility strengthens their unusual household into a real, if unconventional, family that can defend Stephen when he goes too far, that can pull him back him back in and help him redirect his energy. At times touching, at times terrifying, this is a taut and fiercely engaging, uniquely insightful, and inspiring portrait of male adolescence in our complicated world.

The Stardust Lounge

Biographies & Memoirs

Nan A. Talese

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 on his late-night forays so that she can understand his world, welcomes his gang into their apartment, and tries to see life through his eyes. When she discovers that children who are devoted to animals have an easier time forming attachments to other people, she fills their home with a menagerie of ailing or abandoned pets. She also turns to an unconventional therapist who offers unusual — but helpful — treatment. The Stardust Lounge isn’t your usual story of rebellious adolescence. The power of Digges’s memoir comes from her stubborn unwillingness to give up on Stephen. Even when things are roughest, Digges manages to see the intelligent, sensitive child behind the hostile behavior. However difficult the path she chooses, her story is ultimately a heartening one, and it’s impossible not to root for this family as it rebuilds itself.

The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy's Adolescence

Family Relationships

Anchor

A woman who grew up in the Midwest in the 1940s and 1950s describes what it was like to be the daughter of a doctor specializing in cancer, her experiences in a large Dutch immigrant family, and her adult years in college during the turbulent 1960s

Fugitive Spring: A Memoir

Poems deal with time, nature, travel, mortality, story-telling, parents, aging, science, and television

Late In The Millennium: A Book of Poems

"Deborah Digges's 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 we've 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 Digges's 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.

Rough Music

Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the '50s and '60s

Vintage

Deborah Digges's third and best book of poems has been hailed by The New Yorker as "an outstanding collection, " and by Mark Doty as "so exhilarating that even its darkest notes shine with a strange joy." Her subjects range from the graffiti with which a street gang mourns a dead comrade to aples"three red, one golden, like a flower."

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Digges, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Digges, Deborah

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Digges, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart: Poems

Trapeze

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart: Poems

The Stardust Lounge

The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy's Adolescence

Fugitive Spring: A Memoir

Late In The Millennium: A Book of Poems

Rough Music

Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the '50s and '60s

Rough Music