Deborah Digges, a distinguished poet and memoirist who wrote lyrically and hauntingly about the challenges of everyday life, fell to her death April 10. She was 59.
She was found on the ground outside McGuirk Alumni Stadium at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and taken to a Northampton, Mass., hospital, where she was pronounced dead, said a university spokesman.
Police are calling her death an apparent suicide. No foul play was suspected.
Her oldest son, Charles, said he “strongly questions” whether his mother’s death was a suicide. She often exercised at the stadium, no one saw exactly what happened, and she left no note, he said.
Ms. Digges, who lived in Amherst, joined the English faculty at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., in 1986 after publishing her first collection of poems, “Vesper Sparrows.” It won New York University’s Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize for best first book of poetry.
In a statement, senior administrators at Tufts called her death “a great loss for American poetry” and “an especially painful loss for the Tufts community where we knew her not only as one of the outstanding creative visionaries in American poetry, but also as an inspiring teacher, a generous mentor, and a cherished friend.”
For her third collection, “Rough Music” (1995), she received the Kingsley Tufts Award, given by Claremont Graduate School to an emerging poet.
Alice Quinn, who was the longtime poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine and a member of the Claremont panel of judges that honored Ms. Digges, called her poems “among the most beautiful and moving of any being written by a poet of her generation,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 1996.
The keenly observant Ms. Digges often intertwined the human experience with images of nature, crafting works that had a “lived in” feeling.
In her well-reviewed memoir “Fugitive Spring” (1989), she wrote about growing up on an apple orchard with 10 children in Missouri and discovering poetry as a lonely military wife.
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A second memoir, “The Stardust Lounge” (2000), was a wrenching account of her son Stephen’s difficult teenage years. Her unorthodox and ultimately successful approach to pulling him away from gangs and drugs included a large menagerie of pets “meant to stir up his empathy,” she once said.