Between One Future and the Next

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Daigon's poems are acts of noticing, exaltation and love. In straightforward language and familiar images, she takes pleasure in likenesses and delights in transformation of scale and of time. In some poems, memory reaches back to a 1930s childhood and to the lives of immigrant parents. As the edge of a quilt becomes "a trail outlining the long foothills," so generations pass on to each other the glances, gestures, objects and acts that constitute meaning. Too often Daigon's closure seems intrusive or constricting. "A single bird tests the air" is precisely observed and bears the weight of emotion, but the same bird "reminding us today is all there is" is vatic. Although her capacity for celebration and grief sometimes strains against her short lines, Diagon gently and steadfastly approaches the boundaries between the known and the forgotten, and illuminates "how we dance along the slipstream of the past."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Canadian-born concert soprano and poet/ editor Daigon "takes time to cut tenderly/ into the bone and sinew/of the past." Like her carpenter father (she has good poems about him and her mother), she's interested in shapes of memory and distances between loved ones, in how a woman's life is to be observed. These poems trace moments in the midst of the rough-hewn immigrant family life in Manitoba "when the sun honeyed/the earth and things came/softly to order." Her family measured its time against bold, poignant patterns of the Canadian wilderness. Exploring "a steady/ stream of horizons," she celebrates "heartbeats and periods of hunger," and discoveries become memorable awakenings into life: "Quick as overnight it was spring/and underneath/a silence of rocks melting/in the Red and the Assiniboine." Daigon cares about how things are made-a house, letters, snapshots-and she depicts the "measured, muscular" process of their making. Designs of poetry and music find ultimate expression in the craft of Daigon's life. For most poetry collections.
Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.