Between One Future and the Next

Book by Daigon, Ruth

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.

Daigon sang at Dylan Thomas' funeral and later collaborated with W. H. Auden on a recording of Renaissance poetry and music, but it wasn't until she started editing Poets On that she transformed herself from concert soprano to full-time poet-editor. If she still sings as well as she writes, the musical world must be saddened to have lost such a strong voice. In her fourth collection, traces of her musical background surface frequently, bringing rhythm, melody, and resonance to every poem. Her subjects are usually domestic: married women facing "a procession of cardboard moments" and watching time "drip like coffee in the percolator"; relatives standing side by side in photographs that are "slightly out of focus"; and in the sunlight, whole families wrapped "in a gauze of sleep." Without sentimentality or, conversely, bitterness, Daigon presents the family and its machinations without missing a note. Elizabeth Gunderson