by Ruth Daigon

ISBN:1-891298-17-X
116 pages
Small Poetry Press
Select Poets Series

AVAILABLE FROM:

Ruth Daigon
86 Sandpiper Circle
Corte Madera, CA 94925

$15.00 perfect bound plus $2.00 postage

VIVIAN SHIPLEY, Editor of Connecticut Review:
I read poetry to find mature words that help me accept the strange, often jarring edges of a life's experience. In poem after poem of Handfuls of Time, Ruth Daigon explores events as simple as repositioning a mattress and emotions as complex as those experienced by a mother rooted to the banks of the Red River waiting supper for her son. Daigon's poems, with her knowledge that no one survives love, cause me to suck in my breath, then she gives me reason for release. As I read and reread this impressive collection of poems, I thought again and again of the photographer Dorthea Lange, who like Daigon does not crop the ragged edge off the truth.

MICHAEL NEFF, Editor-in-Chief of Web del Sol:
Ruth Daigon's new book Handfuls of Time continues her exploration of the natural world of childhood's mapless country with the lyricism and poignancy which have become her hallmark. Like Mary Oliver, Daigon invests the world with a luminosity and animates silence...she listens hard and lets the simple things speak compellingly to us.

BILL GLEED, Guest Editor, MOONDANCE:

I could say a lot of things about Ruth Daigon's new book, Handfuls of Time, and words like insightful, clear visioned, and true would be accurate, but they would be also insufficient. What Daigon has provided in her collections of poems is a depiction of a spiritual human experience. Each poem is an examination of some particular aspect of life through the most common elements of living. It's Daigon's own certain slant for those small moments which say less about what you do than who you are, and from where you come to be whole as you are right now...These poems are indeed a bit like jazz. Like the sweet strains of a saxophone trailing off into the black night, Daigon leaves us with this thought: We're here for a little while/ and forever is another possibility.

SANDY MCKINNEY, Alsop Review on the Web:

Anyone who spends a fair amount of time hanging out in poetry forums or workshops will, at least once a day, come upon a poem about which the question arises: "What is this poem about?" This question isn't limited to forums and workshops for fledgling poets. I've had to ask the same question about many a poem published in the New Yorker, and even in Poetry. Perhaps a contemporary fear of the banal, along with the sentimental, pressures the aspiring poet to avoid the emotional, the multi-layered, the passionate venture and urges him to settle for pure form, as long as the form doesn't call up any embarrassing questions regarding its ancestry. This refusal to embrace the intrepid often leaves an elegantly structured group of words sitting on the page like a collection of brilliant but mismatched gems in a setting nobody would want to wear to the party.

Take any poem from Ruth Daigon's latest book, Handfuls of Time, and you will never find yourself asking this question. Whatever their ancillary subjects, these poems are about breath, about heartbeat, about that struck moment between our observation of anything (including ourselves) and our response. They are about the space between contiguous objects, the felt moment that registers itself in that part of the mind which is still capable of wonder, and that resides there as a permanent reminder of our tenuous citizenship in a world still awaiting definition...What a joy it is to have the opportunity to encounter a poet of such mature achievement. Check out her work in the AR Poets section.