Full Description
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.
Contents
Contents Timid as Any Herd Animal Stewards at Work The Scientists Gather at Mount St. Helens April Aubade The Wren and the Jet at a Research Forest near Fort Knox, Seventy-One Years since the Bombing of Hiroshima, Eight Months since the Photo of a Three-Year-Old Syrian Boy Facedown on a Turkish Beach, His Red Shirt, His Blue Shorts Fish Like These hitch Traveling Again through the Dark Good Girl Daughter and Father in Winter The Math of Two Bedtime Story The Science of Spirit Lake For Those Who Would See Emissaries Emergency First Grade Her Calling Monsters We Could See The Skookum Indian In Nez Perce Country with Kevin A True Account of Wood-Getting from up the Chumstick C-3PO What Happens It Wasn't the Laundry Exactly What Needs Saying Abortion Wish John Carter of Mars versus the Void Notes, Descending A Song for Today Idaho, Maybe Contextual Education Still Time What Will Keep Us The Empty Road Full of People The Nature of Time Was What They Were Talking About At the Log Decomposition Site in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a Visitation A Moment Ago Her Yarn Opening the Curtains Totality Middle School A Response to a Pair of Forest Plots She Gathers Rocks The Seconds Her Present Acknowledgments
