David Baker, acclaimed for his combination of “visionary scope” (Gettysburg Review) and “emotional intensity” (Georgia Review), is one of contemporary poetry’s most gifted lyric poets. In Swift, he gathers poems from eight collections, including his masterful latest, 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.

Together, these poems showcase the evolution of Baker’s distinct eco-poetic conscience, his mastery of forms both erotic and elegiac, and his keen eye for the shifting landscapes of passion, heartbreak, and renewal. With equal curiosity and candor, Baker explores the many worlds we all inhabit―from our most intimate relationships to the wider social worlds of neighborhoods, villages, and our complex national identity, to the environmental community we all share.

 [Baker’s] work evinces the moral courage of keeping still in the landscape: in our era of climate change, poetry’s mandate to measure the rhythms of the year has become a valuable form of witness. Baker’s reports from the interior leave in all the encroachments that threaten it. He is heir to such writers as Henry David Thoreau . . . and Robert Frost.
To read Baker’s poems collected . . . is to appreciate the full range of their formal resources, their attunement to cycles and processes rather than to mere outcomes and effects—their patience over the long haul. 
Baker is a poet of systems, and of the interrelatedness of apparently discrete phenomena. A poem about an empty field is also, of necessity, a poem about developers, zoning boards, and town meetings. The poems are often themselves complex systems, their vocabularies interlocking like machine parts. Now, assembled as a whole, the machines can be perceived as an even larger operation—a mind susceptible to change, alert to the conditions that effect it.”

 SWIFT: New and Selected Poems, by David Baker. Covering nearly 40 years of work, this career retrospective reveals Baker as a peerless poet of the natural world who never stops trying to see things as if for the first time. “Transience and interconnectedness are his big themes,” Eric McHenry writes in his review. “All of Baker’s poems are rich in observation, imagination and memory. … In his best poems, generously represented here, he builds something lovely and durable from that brokenness.”

– Editors’ Choice, The New York Times;

 Baker’s would be a poetry of place except that the place is general, perhaps anywhere from Maine to the Midwest and out to Oregon that is on the edge of the rural. This place is a space for the entire life cycle of nonhumans and for the anxieties of observant humans. With each poem delicately and sturdily crafted, this collection creates one of the great spaces in American poetry.”
– ROY OLSON, Starred review, Booklist

  Swift: New and Selected Poems gives us the exquisite ear of a poet laid over the precise eye of a naturalist. With Bishop’s thick descriptive texture and Merwin’s attention to vanishing, David Baker listens to the density of being. He is alert to extinctions—trees, insects, small towns and mercies, stillness, love—tracking how things disappear, then return in altered forms. Baker has the naturalist’s intimacy with cycles of death and decay, but he is just as attentive to forces of disappearance in technology and contemporary life. The deep and sweeping power of these poems comes from showing us our own grief, our own loss of interconnectedness, and nature’s capacity to offer us ways back into presence. They are full of everything I value most: humility, wonder, and a heartbreaking love for the world.
– JOANNA KLINK

  “The soft pewter sky sets off the black / checkmark bodies of the birds as they skitter,” writes David Baker, and so background and foreground, stillness and motion are harnessed to describe an outer landscape that also delineates an inner, charged landscape. David Baker’s new and selected poems reveal his keen imagination and the formal mastery that infuse his emotionally resonant work.”
– ARTHUR SZE

  No one writes with a more acute attention to the immediate world than David Baker, but his relish of particulars is always subject to a broader meditation that looks behind and ahead. If his large concern is nature, he should not be pigeon-holed as an ecological or a pastoral poet.  He is not only a poet of exacting, often scientific intelligence, but a poet of the heart, and if he has given us a courageously tender lyric like “Never Ending Birds,” he has reinforced that accomplishment with the bold experimentation of “Scavenger Loop.”  To read the whole of Swift is to witness more than thirty years of exquisite artistry. David Baker is one of our finest poets.
  – RODNEY JONES