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 ...

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 ...

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...