Swift: New and Selected Poems

by David Baker

Overview

“Rich in observation, imagination and memory.” —New York Times Book Review

Gathering poems from eight collections along with a stunning suite of new poems, David Baker showcases the evolution of his 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393358179
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/18/2020
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

David Baker’s many honors include fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. The recipient of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, Baker teaches at Denison University and lives in Granville, Ohio.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xv

New Poems

Pastoral 3

Why Not Say 4

Early May 5

Stolen Sonnet 7

Why Not Say 9

Tree Frogs 10

The Sea 11

After 13

The Osprey 14

Waiting for News 16

The Wren 17

Gather 18

Checkpoint 19

Elegy, in Words 21

Peril Sonnet 22

From Scavenger Loop (2015)

Swift 27

Simile 29

What Is a Weed? 30

Magnolia 33

Five Odes on Absence 34

Belong To 39

Scavenger Loop 41

From Never-Ending Birds (2009)

Trillium 73

Posthumous Man 75

The Rumor 79

Horse Madness 82

Never-Ending Birds 85

Bay 86

Too Many 89

From Midwest Eclogue (2005)

Monarchs Landing and Flying 93

Hyper- 94

The Spring Ephemerals 98

Winged 100

Midwest Eclogue 101

The Blue 104

Late Pastoral 105

From Changeable Thunder (2001)

Benton's Clouds 111

Pulp Fiction 114

Trees beside Water 116

After Rain 119

The City of God 120

Unconditional Election 122

Ohio Fields after Rain 123

From The Truth About Small Towns (1998)

Still-Hildreth Sanitorium, 1936 127

Yellow Lilies and Cypress Swamp 130

Holiday Bunting 132

The Truth about Small Towns 134

Tract 137

The Affair 139

Treatise on Touch 140

From After the Reunion (1994)

Snow Figure 145

Along the Storm Front 147

Red Shift 148

Faith 150

Murder 151

Mercy 156

After the Reunion 157

From Sweet Home, Saturday Night (1991) and Haunts (1985)

November: The End of Myth 161

Starlight 162

Patriotics 164

Running the River Lines 166

The Wrecker Driver Foresees Your Death 167

The Anniversary of Silence 169

Haunts 171

Notes 175

Editorial Reviews

"These are poems to read slowly as a place for sitting—to escape into a daily meditation where the good and the beautiful are filled with surprise. Baker uses the page in new and traditional ways. These implications from the earth make clear our societal issues and our personal relationships, and you will be grateful that someone is speaking for you."

Washington Independent Review of Books - Grace Cavalieri

"[Baker] endows the landscape of the Midwest and its wildlife with a cosmic radiance.… It would seem he carries around in his pocket a botanist’s field guide, tucks under his arm a scrolled bundle of star charts that put the galactic whorls at his fingertips, and keeps well stocked a shelf of volumes cataloging every species from the Asteroidea to red-tailed hawks."

Gettysburg Review - Floyd Collins

"[Swift] affords a longitudinal view of a sensibility that is itself devoted to observing change over time.… To read Baker’s poems collected in this way is to appreciate the full range of their formal resources, their attunement to cycles and processes rather than to mere outcomes and effects."

The New Yorker - Dan Chiasson

"David Baker is a virtuoso of the long poem.… Meditative, ecological, and sensitively attuned to the complex interplay of subjectivity and context, Swift expands what it means for a self to be in conversation with larger systems.… The voice sustaining this collection is a sonorous whole."

On the Seawall - Tyler Mills

"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.… [His] project, in large part, has been to help us hear the inaudible and see the invisible."

Troy Jollimore

"David Baker is a master of places defined by science and art.… Baker grabs his audience with poems that are accurate yet creative, precise yet profound."

New York Journal of Books - Andrew Jarvis

"Opening the book, fifteen new poems invite us into an ecopoetic vision of subtlety as well as clarity.… If you’re new to Baker’s work as I was, expect to enjoy its formal permutations; couplets, fragments, thin columns and often full pentameter lines are all tools to build his aviaries. Thematically, the selected works evoke a naturalist’s playful curiosity, a child’s love for his parents, and a humanist’s concern for the world."

Entropy - Nate Duke

"Baker is as thoughtful a poet as anyone writing today. It is as if his thoughts grew out of his sensations, not the other way around. The difference is a difference indeed, and Swift is a testament to its possibilities."

Cortland Review - David Rigsbee

"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."

Editors’ Choice

For close to 40 years—on the evidence gathered in Swift: New and Selected Poems—[Baker's] been working to see and describe things as though for the first time. He can lay down an elegant line when he wants to, but he favors an authenticating roughness to a consoling smoothness; when euphony and precision are at cross-purposes in his writing, euphony yields…All of Baker's poems are rich in observation, imagination and memory. But it's syntax that allows him to synthesize those elements, and to catch his own mind in the act of doing so. "The world gives you itself in fragments / in splinters," Baker writes. In his best poems, generously represented here, he builds something lovely and durable from that brokenness.

The New York Times Book Review - Eric McHenry

"‘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 pigeonholed as an ecological or a pastoral poet. He is not only a poet of exacting, often scientific intelligence, but a poet of the heart…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

"With each poem delicately and sturdily crafted, this collection creates one of the great spaces in American poetry."

Booklist (starred review)

"Swift 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…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

"[Baker's] work evinces the moral courage of keeping still in the landscape. . . . He is heir to such writers as Henry David Thoreau . . . and Robert Frost. . . . To read Baker's poems collected in this way is to appreciate the full range of their formal resources, their attunement to cycles and processes rather than to mere outcomes and effects."

The New Yorker