Poetry
We are all human and nonhuman on the move. The poems in Transit emerge from just such a walk through the world. In keenly observed verse, David Baker carries us across physical and emotional geographies, moving seamlessly from deep woods, city streets, and creek beds to the contours of his psyche and the larger cultural circumstances that mark off our lives. Several of the poems operate as field notes, drawn from Baker’s work assessing bird migrations, streamflow, and geological movements alongside environmental scientists.
Whale Fall
David Baker expands both his environment and his form in his eleventh collection. Whale Fall is about time, measured in the wingbeats of a hummingbird or the epochs of geological change, and about place, whether a backyard in Ohio or the slopes of a melting glacier. In its exquisite, musical title poem, a deft hybrid of eco-poetic alarm and intimate narrative of illness, Baker transports us to the deep sea as a single whale carcass falls, decays, and is reinhabited by a cosmos of teeming lives. Amidst climate change, catastrophe, and viral disease, each of these poems is an echolocation, emitting its song to the vastness of the world.
Swift
Poems from eight collections, including Scavenger Loop (2015); the prize-winning, intimate travelogues of Never-Ending Birds (2009); and the complications of history and home in Changeable Thunder (2001). Opening the volume are fifteen new poems that continue Baker’s growth in form and voice as he investigates the death of parents, the loss of homeland, and a widening natural history, not only of his beloved Midwest but of the tropical flora and fauna of a Caribbean island.
Scavenger Loop
From eco-poetics to the erotic, Scavenger Loop measures the dimensions of the pastoral and the elegy in contemporary lyric poetry. In this masterful new work David Baker constructs a layered natural history of his beloved Midwest and traces the complex story of human habitation from family and village life to the evolving nature of work and the mysterious habitats of the heart.
At the center of Scavenger Loop is a sustained investigation of cycles and the natural recycling of things, and a discovery that even out of the discarded and the lost may come rebirth and renewal. In the process Baker reveals how everything bears the potential to be both invasive and life-giving: plants that beautify and conquer, chemicals that heal and destroy, words that mislead and instruct.
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Never-Ending Birds
Part map, part travelogue, part chronicle, part autobiography, Never-Ending Birds explores a variety of landscapes from Midwestern villages to the boroughs of big cities. Steeped in story―divorce, loss, raising a child, uncovering old worlds and new loves―these poems are gracefully lived in, lived through, with mystery and beauty.
Midwest Eclogue
Midwest Eclogue is a profound dialogue between the heartland and the heart. David Baker’s devotions are erotic and familial, natural and environmental, literary and social. Inspired by the landscape of the Midwest, Baker’s landscape of human passions―haunted by roots and wings―is rendered in a rich and polyphonic craft.
Changeable Thunder
Changeable Thunder marks David Baker’s emergence as a major contemporary poet. To his abiding sense of the Midwest―its politics, people, and landscapes―Baker adds a powerful historical dimension, with poems ranging from Puritan New England to the modern subway. Of particular note are poems on the works of other writers, as he reanimates Shelley’s letters, Samuel Sewall’s diaries, and Walt Whitman’s novel. With brilliant technique, dazzling formal variety, and moving intimacy, Baker’s poems explore personal illness, erotic and familial passion, artistic creation, and the constant work and changing weather of one man’s life.
The Truth About Small Towns
Denison professor and poetry editor of the Kenyon Review, Baker (After the Reunion, 1994) stays true to his subject in this, his fifth book of poems in which he asks us to lean down and listen. And when we do, we hear the steady rhythms and strong cadences of a poet who measures his praise of the natural world and his celebration of love with the darkness that threatens both, all within the setting of small, rural towns.
After The Reunion
“After the Reunion” is an intensely lyrical collection of love poems and elegies from “the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright,” as Marilyn Hacker has described him. In these quiet, powerful, and eloquent poems, David Baker explores the kinship of love to loss, discovering that each is an inevitable component of the other. The final movement of the book is a unification of these two modes and becomes a celebration of continuities, kinships, and renewals.
Haunts
David Baker published his first book of poetry, “Haunts,” in 1985. That title, both noun and verb, says a lot about the tone and tenor of the poetry Baker has published in the 3½ decades since, a substantial career that is generously represented in “Swift: New and Selected Poems.” Baker’s poetic universe is a hushed, melancholy and at times ghostly place, haunted both by attachments to the past and by anxiety about its increasingly uncertain future.
– TROY JOLLIMORE, THE WASHINGTON POST
Laws Of The Land
For David Baker, a poet of the Midwest and West, the frontier is not out there in 1981. It is still out of sight, but it is down under, inside. For Baker, it palpably is. In Laws of the Land, his first collection, this fine poet slowly shows us how eerily thin is the crust between a man’s life and his plunge into the unknown, which is to say Death.