Beginning and Ending with Emily: Ghazals & Golden Shovels

by Scott Wiggerman

100 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2026

About the author

Scott Wiggerman is the author of "Leaf and Beak," "Presence," "Vegetables and Other Relationships" and the publisher of Dos Gatos Press' annual "Texas Poetry Calendar," now in its nineteenth edition. He is also the editor of the "Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair" anthology, of a haiku anthology, "Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga," as well as the best-selling "Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry" and "Wingbeats II." His latest edited tome is "Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems" (2016).

Reviews

[Scott Wiggerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've not ever reviewed one of my own books, but I just finished Beginning and Ending with Emily, reading it as a reader rather than the author or proofreader, and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it! Several times I had to stop and think, "Did I write this? It's really good!"

I love the unexpected rhymes of the ghazals, as well as their many shifts in tone and point of view from couplet to couplet. I love the order of the poems and the progression from love and the body in the first half to death and the soul in the second. I love the way Emily Dickinson's lines reverberate in every poem, including the golden shovels. And I love lines like:

You'd like to ask God about loss, but that spirit has passed.
Have you prayed to find something lost? I found a crumb today.

or

They say there are reasons the heart has no spine.
You and I must remember to lie tonight.

Oh, I could go on. But I will stop here. Let me just say, there's a lot to love in this book--worth the long wait since my last one!

[John Pappas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning. I have a practice of dog-earring the lower corner page of my favorite poems and I ended up dog-earring more pages than not. I found myself laughing with joy and surprise in almost every poem.