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
“In Not for Luck, Derek Sheffield achieves something of inestimable value: a trustworthy, convincing voice.” —MARK DOTY, winner of the 2008 National Book Award and author of What Is the Grass
“Here is a true voice in our Western landscape.” —GARY SOTO, author of New and Selected Poems, finalist for the National Book Award
“Derek Sheffield’s poems are familial in a bracingly unfamiliar way. Their moments of tenderness are fragile and earned. Their melancholy is serene. Their passages of greatest power tend to portray beauty at the moment we realize we cannot keep hold of it without destroying it, and so release it like a grown daughter or wild trout. The moments of light dazzle. The moments of darkness haunt, yet remain ever alert to the eerie, breakable beauties of this Earth and its human and other families. Not for Luck is a skilled, true, deeply lived collection.” —DAVID JAMES DUNCAN, author of The Brothers K and The River Why
“In this richly satisfying collection, Derek Sheffield displays an apparently effortless ability to rise from the most physically grounded data drawn from the natural world into the rapt region of lyrical daydream. Here is a poet working at the top of his talent, creating an often radiant display of crystalline moments drawn or filtered out of the ordinary passages of life—as father, husband, son, teacher, environmentalist, and most of all (to bring all these together) poet.” —EAMON GRENNAN, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and author of There Now
“Not for Luck is a quintessential collection of poems that examines the narrative intersections of nature and nurture. With pitch perfect descriptions, Derek Sheffield sharpens our senses to the world around us, a world in which the natural order of things invariably involves loss and rejuvenation. Sheffield's natural world, a place of learning that never stops, is a world of hope, a place of resilience where “what we know / of the tribe whose / steps have fallen / before ours,” makes clear our way forward.” —COLLEEN J. MCELROY, author of Blood Memory and Here I Throw Down My Heart
Here is a true voice in our Western landscape.
In this richly satisfying collection, Derek Sheffield displays an apparently effortless ability to rise from the most physically grounded data drawn from the natural world into the rapt region of lyrical daydream. Here is a poet working at the top of his talent, creating an often radiant display of crystalline moments drawn or filtered out of the ordinary passages of life—as father, husband, son, teacher, environmentalist, and most of all (to bring all these together) poet.
Not for Luck is a quintessential collection of poems that examines the narrative intersections of nature and nurture. With pitch perfect descriptions, Derek Sheffield sharpens our senses to the world around us, a world in which the natural order of things invariably involves loss and rejuvenation. Sheffield's natural world, a place of learning that never stops, is a world of hope, a place of resilience where “what we know / of the tribe whose / steps have fallen / before ours,” makes clear our way forward.
In Not for Luck, Derek Sheffield achieves something of inestimable value: a trustworthy, convincing voice.
Derek Sheffield’s poems are familial in a bracingly unfamiliar way. Their moments of tenderness are fragile and earned. Their melancholy is serene. Their passages of greatest power tend to portray beauty at the moment we realize we cannot keep hold of it without destroying it, and so release it like a grown daughter or wild trout. The moments of light dazzle. The moments of darkness haunt, yet remain ever alert to the eerie, breakable beauties of this Earth and its human and other families. Not for Luck is a skilled, true, deeply lived collection.
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.
We have less need for luck when we nurture all our relations, and this is a book that honors myriad forms of kinship. In poems to Laika the Russian space dog, to a friend at wood-cutting, to a chicken named C-3PO, to a nanny in pain, these poems “start saying exactly what needs saying.” In oblique blessings to daughters, to an unknown half-brother, to a poet lost and found, to a crippled ancestor, Sheffield deals homage in all directions clean as a mountain stream. How to heal connections with such lyric “winks of calm”? When a warbler lands on the tip of your fishing rod, you know.
Derek Sheffield, one of the Northwest’s most important ecologically centered writers, crafts poetry that often intermingles the human and non-human worlds. In his works wilderness enriches us, makes us more human, and reminds us of our own primordial origins. In “Emergency,” modernity gives right of way to deer that cross a road, and all who witness these creatures are not unlike the deer: transfixed, slightly nervous. The short, delicate lines of the poem, a piece devoid of ornament, suggest a shortness of breath, a simultaneous quickening and decelerating of experience. The ending of the poem potently reminds that there are two species being witnessed and that both, full of pulsing blood, sentient, and vulnerable, belong.
In the poems that comprise Not for Luck, Derek Sheffield has created a collection of love letters to the earth, its varied landscapes, atmospheres, weathers and living things. But what he has also compiled is a record of his experiences in those landscapes, and expressions of gratitude to those with whom he has shared those experiences. Finally, he has also made a list—like those that travelers make before packing for a lengthy trip—in order to remember items they cannot do without: in Sheffield’s case, communication, the mutual trust without which life is a desert, and those people—and beings not necessarily human—whose presence in our lives gives everything else its value. Poem after poem reflects on the interconnectedness threatened today by our new and increasing dependence on technology to keep us company, and the resulting solitude and decrease in empathy that cheapens human life. Some of these conversational, direct, deceptively simple poems--especially those that record the childhood of the poet’s two daughters—“Daughter and Father in Winter,” “Bedtime Story” and “Her Calling,”—sing their gratitude for shared joy remembered. And others—“Her Yarn,” “It Wasn’t the Laundry”— reveal how even strangers may touch lives across miles and generations. And some illustrate, through unforgettable imagery, what our species may come to accept as normal after the loss of those essentials Sheffield honors in his work. Read “The Wren and the Jet…” and those poems named above; better still, read the whole book. It will make you a wiser packer for your—no, our—trip into the future.
Derek Sheffield's book, Not for Luck, revels in the names of things, of birds and trees and water and weeds, and the book wears its learning lightly. But it's not merely an accounting of the nouns of the world: Sheffield gives accurate names to specific incandescent states of being, those that are hardest to capture, including and especially love. These poems are suffused with the love of a father for his daughters, of a husband for his wife, and the love of an ardent observer, a joyful participant in the closely observed physical world. “Let's not forget those dusky gnats,” he reminds us, or the dog that will “perk her ears / toward something always coming, that never quite arrives.” Sheffield is a master of these liminal states, and in rendering them, achieves a kind of off-hand-sounding lyricism that is anything but accidental, as in this fly-fishing poem: “It was when a yellow warbler tumbled leaf-like / from a streamside willow to nearly snap / my dropper before landing with a tap / on my rod tip, jittery droplet / of an eye flicking toward mine.” Not For Luck is a kind of gift back to the world, for all its terrors and delights. In these lines Sheffield catalogs the everyday with an eye toward the miraculous, and with a honed attention to the poetry, to the sound and the sense of the world around us.
What to expect from Derek Sheffield’s fine new collection? Imagine an ancient Chinese poet, wise in the ways of mountains and rivers, who is, in addition, a fellow spirit of animals, a keen observer of neighbors and strangers, a vivid miner of memories, and a father blessed with daughters. Imagine poetry that can embrace flyfishing, bedtime stories, backwoods lore, atomic bombs, indigenous history, and everyday love. Imagine, enter this field of poems, and enjoy.
Derek Sheffield writes with a marvelous dual vision, coalescing details of the natural and human worlds, illuminating moments that sparkle and shimmer within.
