Baker, like Yeats, was an elegist even before he’d suffered much loss. “A figure of speech is where desire forces a crisis, a crossing- / one world and its weather suddenly brilliant with meaning,” he writes, in “Snow Figure,” from his third book. The volume affords a longitudinal view of a sensibility that is itself devoted to observing change over time.īaker’s early work names preoccupations that he hadn’t quite figured out how to embody, but these balder expressions help pinpoint what is later only implied. “ Swift: New and Selected Poems” (Norton) samples eight of his collections and adds a ravishing suite of new elegies for his parents. He is heir to such writers as Henry David Thoreau, who marked the loss of Sudbury River shad after a dam was built upstream, and Robert Frost, who heard in the song of “ The Oven Bird” the ominous news that “the highway dust is over all.”īaker is a professor of English at Denison University and the longtime poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. Baker’s reports from the interior leave in all the encroachments that threaten it.
His 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 poems depend on long acquaintance with a small place, where year-over-year comparison makes even the arrival of a feeding monarch or a nagging blue jay a standout event. His mind operates against the vividly rendered landscape of small-town Ohio, where he has lived for more than thirty years. David Baker is a poet of American anti-pastoral.
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