The Golden Shovel, a poetic form invented by Terrence Hayes, has a direct connection to the poet's subconscious. The speaker of these poems has a lifelong quarrel with society's inequalities but finds solace and renewal by spending time in gardens and on Pacific Northwest forest trails. She admires insects, birds, and plants, and is particularly fond of lichens, fungi, and mosses. Duff, the decaying detritus on the forest floor, delivers nutrients to the trees and nurtures an array of colorful mushrooms and other fungi. Sheila Sondik sees this metaphorically as the work of memory and creativity. She revisits her own along with her daughters' childhoods as she walks. The quoted lines of poetry embedded in the right margin of each poem are quotes from the poets Sheila read and reread throughout her 20s. In Lighting Up the Duff, she revisits them from the vantage point of her 70s. This book is, in large part, an homage to those poets who helped launch her on this path.
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Sheila Sondik's Lighting Up the Duff indeed illuminates the path of a life-strewn at the poet's feet, and at our own, the wonders, ironies, and sorrows that befall us. These poems, more magic windows than weighty shovels, offer encouragement, solace, humor, and intimate company as we listen to the voice of a friend who knows us. There's further enchantment in the resonances between Sondik's poems and those of the master poets she honors with these. I've spent grateful hours in this collection's shimmering grove, and I'll walk there again.
-Jed Myers, author of Learning to Hold
The 26 short poems in Sheila Sondik's Lighting Up the Duff are exquisitely crafted homages to her poetic influences, including Linda Pastan, Maxine Kumin, Kenneth Rexroth, and Terrance Hayes, whose invented form, the Golden Shovel, rules. Although they do not ignore the despair endemic to our times-naysayers, ecological disaster, all doom and zoom-the poems sway like an artist between landscape's dark shapes and the hours of light, steadily urging us toward hope. Attending to these poems, like tending green plants, is food for our souls.
-Bethany Reid, author of The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm
