Transit is a powerful work of lyric ecology.  David Baker’s twenty-four new poems see with the precision of a surveyor’s transit—an eyepiece intricately balanced yet far-seeing—as Baker measures landscapes geographical and internal, crossing boundaries, open spaces, and mapping the gaps and fissures of passing time, marking our history.

 

Writing for the Washington Post, Ron Charles praised the range of Baker’s environmental vision, noting his “understanding of the natural world that is both scientific and transcendent.” In Transit Baker takes further steps to broaden this ecological engagement.  In a number of poems, he documents his recent experience working alongside ecological scientists, conducting fieldwork with ornithologists, geologists, arborists, specialists in water-flow and grasslands, learning their methodologies and the precision of their languages.

 

Ecology also means to write about home.  Baker’s poems are grounded in a profound sense of place.  But this new work widens the meaning of residence.  His poems take a long walk through our lives, across backyards and urban streets, into deep woods and down rocky creeks, finding home in the journey as well as the dwelling.  Baker uses his powerful lyric lens to provide an ongoing map of human presence alongside jewelweed, little brown bats, and talking fireflies. He surveys the beautiful—from deep forest to bay-shore, creek bed to curbside—even as he documents gun violence, toxic spills, and the living scars of colonialism.  In Transit Baker finds a song for it all, charting the pathways, byways, and lifegiving waterways that lead us together to the sea.