Late in the Millennium, by Deborah Digges
(Knopf, 1989)
If I could have a contest for which lyric poet burrows more deeply into the earth, more completely voices what I consider the earth part in me, I wouldn’t care for the contest to end. I would just care who was allowed in as a contestant. In my review of Mark Doty’s My Alexandria, I mentioned the Stadium Arena Voice, which is this figuration to describe how I hear the poems. They are aggressively confident and logical, and they encompass me. And what I mean by that is they are inescapable. I don’t question how his narratives fit into one another. Why would I need to? I know that beneath these narratives lies an implicit truth which cannot be exhausted. It is deep and plentiful and more. That’s all I can think while I’m reading it. I want more, even if it means Doty has to live through all that tragedy and pain.
The figuration I would use for Deborah Digges’ Late in the Millennium appears in “Tartarchos.” The speaker of the poem is a girl. Her mother has just beat her sister with a brush, and so she runs to the pond where there are hills, and ruts in those hills have been eroded deep enough that the girl can hide inside them. “Eye-level with the earth,” among an entire inventory of rusted sled runners and old scarves, she can hide. In a book of poems that uses the turning of sycamore leaves as a statement of logic, or the extinction of angels to explain why we’re lonely, seeing a young girl “eye-level with the earth” seems the most appropriate figure for picturing the book’s voice. It is safe. It has found a place to be brave. It is fully consumed by whatever those rhythms or mineral qualities or dark subtleties are. And, like Doty, I feel Digges’ voice encompass me.
But the encompassing is different. In Doty, I feel subsumed by the logic arising from each of his narratives coinciding with one another. Late in the Millennium draws from something different. It takes that dark poem-feeling I get when I read a Mary Oliver or a Jane Hirshfield poem and extends it past the neat poem-lite container they keep their poems in. Digges’ work feels colossal. It feels borne. It doesn’t know what a poem-container would be. She has two sestinas in the book, and I find their maneuvers through the form to be only a small part of their work as poem. It’s like when she makes reference to the Tower of Babel in “Secrets,” she isn’t using that easy poem-allusion-as-guiding-analogy-for-the-poem method. The poetry I’ve read by Mary Oliver seems to operate on this level. The point of the poem is to make the reader see the equation of allusion and circumstance. For Digges the poem is a tapestry of allusion, narrative, circumstance and wildly submersed sentences. Those sentences that continue past the line break, where you thought it would end, past the last qualifier, where you thought it might rest. Her sentences will not tire.
This might be the quality that leads me to say that these are poems of the earth, because they are tireless. They begin as naturally as holding the door open for someone who’s coming in right behind you. And they are earnest, though I’m not entirely sure the subject they are so earnest of. Is it the unknowable origin of human intention? Or the inevitable circularity of human activity? Maybe it’s something in the book’s two sestinas, something about the muscular rhythms innate to that form could be what informs the earnestness of these poems.
Recommended links:
Late in the Millennium
Her obituary (most unfortunately)
A video of her reading
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