Deborah Digges, "Vesper Sparrows" and "Darwin's Finches"

Song Sparrow

                                                                     
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19201

 If you’re a regular here, you might remember that I was quite positive about Deborah Digges’ “Vesper Sparrows” on March 7.  Here are the first five lines again:
            I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air,

            shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine

         to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed   

            urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls.

From in there the ransacked cadavers are carried . . .

How many poets of any era would have the ear and the judgment to decide that three lines of unqualified prettiness are enough. Maybe Digges was thinking, "Let’s switch to a different key—oh, I don’t know.  Maybe . . . some. . .  'rainbowed/urine of suicides.'” Add in some cadavers from Bellevue, while we're at it.

Will anyone out there claim to have thought of birds sheathing themselves in mid-air, after which their wings are “shut” as they ride “the light’s poor spine//to earth”?  Liar! That combination of accuracy and imagination is stunning. More than once in guides to brids, I've read about the "undulating" flight of finches. So how could I have missed the sheathing of wings in the flight of finches and other small birds at dusk? How could I have failed to see that those wings are then, briefly, shut, like the doors of a car? Ms. Digges, you are more observant, more metaphorical, more incisive than I am. I envy it and admire it.

Not much literature of any genre is this rich and dense, sudden and dramatic, yet there's nothing cheap, undeserved, or melodramatic in Digges' shifts of subject, mood and tone. In those five lines, she demonstrates why free verse at its best owes no apology to fixed forms of rhyme and meter. Here once again is the whole poem:  Vesper Sparrows by Deborah Digges : The Poetry Foundation

Gold Finch after Evening Bath

Today I offer another Deborah Digges poem, “Darwin’s Finches,” which I find lovely, yet not quite the achievement of “Vesper Sparrows.” To attempt to support my point, here is Section 1, which I’ve laid out as prose. Why? To suggest that it might be as close to prose as it is to poetry, which is the risk free verse always takes. Does it need to be poetry? Does it deserve to be poetry?

Well, “Darwin’s Finches” probably does, hence its usefulness as an example. This makes for pretty rich prose, but it still raises the question, does it need or deserve to be broken into lines of poetry?  Look at how natural it sounds and feels without line breaks:

Darwin's Finches by Deborah Digges

My mother always called it a nest, the multi-colored mass harvested from her six daughters' brushes, and handed it to one of us after she had shaped it, as we sat in front of the fire drying our hair. She said some birds steal anything, a strand of spider's web, or horse's mane, the residue of sheep's wool in the grasses near a fold where every summer of her girlhood hundreds nested. Since then I've seen it for myself, their genius— how they transform the useless. I've seen plastics stripped and whittled into a brilliant straw, and newspapers—the dates, the years— supporting the underweavings.

House Finch

[For some reason, Blogspot has dictated that I keep on italicizing. What Blogspot wants . . .  Anyway, from here on, it's just me, not Digges, and in a just world it would be plain text. You may go to the following site for the whole poem. I'm sorry I couldn't find it in the form of a single click; please copy and paste this address--it's worth it]: 

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19201

Simply by shifting and expanding the subject into a Section 2, Digges builds some energy and interest. Then the shifts within it further deserve the label of poetry—good poetry at that. The subject of mortality and an afterlife have rarely been conveyed with more  surprise--and an appropriate delicacy.

Did You Know the Cardinal Is Also a Finch?

But it took all of Section 1 to get this. Or did it?  How much of Section 1 is essential if we’re to arrive at Section 2, both nourished by that first body of information, and surprised, in a good way, at the switch to a love poem and a tenderly complex meditation on mortality?

      I like and admire both poems, and I don't mean to make everything a competition. However, "Vesper Sparrows" comes out sprinting, charging, and challenging from Line 1 onward, while "Darwin's Finches" takes its time. It might be more elegant and gracious, befitting its themes, but "Vesper Sparrows" astonishes me somewhat gently in Lines 1-3, then turns my head into a punching bag in Line 4 and never lets up. Call me a masochist, but I like that. I'd rather not wait for a poem to find its energy; that's part of my harping about a gift in every line. However, it would be nice to have make such distinctions about kinds of excellence and power in every pair of poems I come across. 

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19201