Swift
New and Selected Poems
18 September 2020
Description
A sweeping achievement from a poet whose rhythms are as alive to the roll and tang of syllables on the tongue as they are to the circulation of blood and sap (Rosanna Warren, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize citation).
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 candour, Baker explores the many worlds we all inhabit—from our most intimate relationships to the wider social worlds of neighbourhoods, villages and our complex national identity, to the environmental community we all share.
With his dazzling formal restlessness and lifelong devotion to landscapes both natural and human on full display, David Baker demonstrates why he has been called “the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright” (Marilyn Hacker).
Reviews
"[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
"This career retrospective reveals Baker as a peerless poet of the natural world." — Editors’ Choice, The New York Times Book Review
Also By: David Baker 
Whale Fall: Poems
Paperback, 2024
A masterful and moving new volume from a “peerless poet of the natural world” (The New York Times Book Review)
Whale Fall: Poems
Hardback, 2022
A masterful and moving new volume from a “peerless poet of the natural world” (New York Times Book Review).
Whale Fall: Poems
E Book, 2022
“The craft of Whale Fall defies. It asserts, for me, a definition of poetry: an unbearable gulf of feeling made indelible by form.”—Diane Seuss, Paris Review
A masterful and moving new volume from...
Scavenger Loop: Poems
Paperback, 2016
"[The] language . . . Feels almost ancient solely by the skill with which Baker uses it."—Los Angeles Review of Books.
Scavenger Loop: Poems
E Book, 2015
“[The] language . . . feels almost ancient solely by the skill with which Baker uses it.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
