Not For Luck
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Michigan State University Press
Published:1st Jan '21
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Selected by Mark Doty for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize
In Not For Luck, Derek Sheffield ushers us into the beauty and grace that comes from giving attention to the interconnections that make up our lives. In particular, these poems explore a father’s relationship with his daughters, which is rooted in place and time. There is tenderness and an abiding ecological consciousness, but also loss and heartache, especially about environmental degradation. We are invited to listen to the languages of other beings. Through encounters with a herd of deer, a circle of salmon in a mountain creek, two bears on a stretch of coast, a river otter, and a shiny-eyed wood rat, these poems offer moments of wonder that celebrate our place as one species among many on our only earth.
“Derek Sheffield writes with a marvelous dual vision, coalescing details of the natural and human worlds, illuminating moments that sparkle and shimmer within.”—ARTHUR SZE, author of Sight Lines, winner of the 2019 National Book Award
“Poetry to make you long for moments in the wild.”—THE MILLIONS
“Exquisitely observed, crystalline in its imagery, this book is an act of vision, bringing us the world up close. Keenly attuned to time’s passage and the inevitability of loss, these poems unspool patiently, slowing us down so that we may dwell in “the aggregate beauty of every trout / and star-clotted night.” Like the wood rat in “The Seconds,” Sheffield is a collector, a historian “who would make hill after hill of all the years.” Lucky us.” —ELLEN BASS, author of Indigo and Like a Beggar
ISBN: 9781611863895
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
104 pages