Not For Luck

Reviews / Votes

"Poetry to make you long for moments in the wild."-THE MILLIONS "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 "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