Swift: New and Selected Poems
David Baker
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Swift: New and Selected Poems
David Baker
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Swift: New and Selected Poems samples eight of his collections and adds a ravishing suite of new elegies for his parents. The volume affords a longitudinal view of a sensibility that is itself devoted to observing change over time.
[Baker] 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.
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.
Baker’s would be a poetry of a 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.
David Baker is a master of places defined by science and art. His poems create human emotions through scientific, yet creative, placements in the natural world. Humans are placed in multisensory and scientific environments to create sentimental metaphors.