David Baker is a virtuoso of the long poem, as can be seen in Swift: New & Selected Poems. This collection showcases, across multiple books, Baker’s finely wrought lyric pacing — a rhythmic and organic patterning of motif and sound that generates narrative movement. 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 — family, community, politics—that intersect with one’s individual experiences. Baker’s small poems feel large, and his long poems are expansive, yet notably detailed, ruminations on nature — birds, deer, sycamores, rainfall, the sea —and human relationships that are interconnected with the earth.
The New Poems section of Swift presents an overview of what Baker is working on now, particularly in terms of form; these poems confront the lyric poem’s epiphanic ending by articulating a space beyond the thought, beyond the poem. Seven of the 15 poems of this section end almost like a voice caught up and lifted away by a breeze. These poems drift off with a dash, often after richly fragmented memories and images are spliced together, to a powerful effect. In a world of noise — buzzing gadgets, the feverish-paced 24-hour news cycle, explosive action films that take as long to watch as a production of Anna Karenina —the new poems in Swift shrug off the declamatory, the resolvable, the consumable “aha” of lyric’s epiphanic I. Consider the ending “Why Not Say,” a poem that wrestles with the language of loss and the loss of a father:
The high water low water again.
Backwash and foam in the flood pools — no fault,
she said, there never is, the simple white gravel
scattered on the new bridge surface and this time
he didn’t fall. We went to the other side. What
about that, he said. He threw a rock. The permanent
havoc of little mistakes. A hip full of pins and
surgery scars. The hit-spit of a bluegill and the cotton-
wood seeds small branches greening the old shoe eddying swallows
the heat. The shallows. And the slow wash of days —
The dash-ending new poems convey spatial expansion and the continuance of thought that moves past the page — past what an epiphany can promise and into a new way of thinking about how a poem can provide a space that the voice can continue into.
Loss, grief, and death are the new work’s themes, elegizing the natural world, as in “Peril Sonnet” — a sonnet broken into half lines by the emptiness of a caesura. The poem begins: “Where do you suppose / they’ve gone the bees now // that you don’t see them / anymore four-winged // among flowers.” What then accrues across this section are the daily losses of an ill and aging parent, interspersed with the incremental, though each in their own monumental, losses of the natural elements of our world. A caesura also splits the lines of “Early May,” though not into dropped ones. However, this poem asks:
how did we lose it
more than morning mist we don’t call it
extinction we never had it like
white siding peeling off the barn’s sun side.
(The italicized text borrows from Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.) The details in Baker’s poems suggest that no observation is insignificant; in his elegiac mode, our losses compound with those of species, places, and environments. As he says in “Tree Frogs,” “Such little things we are.” Since we continue to reckon, catastrophe by catastrophe, with the human-made ruin of the earth, I wonder — and will look forward to — how Baker will develop his themes as our condition becomes more dire.
After spending quite a bit of time with Swift in the order the poet arranged it (most recent poems to least recent), I read the book from back to front so I could track, chronologically, the lyric interests the early poems set forth. I delighted in coming across these lines in Part 4 of the long poem “Murder,” from Baker’s early book, After the Reunion (1994):
Excuse me.
My friend, who loves poetry truly, says too much
nature taints my work.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Too many birds, stars—
too much rain,
too much grass—
so many wild, bowing limbs
howling or groaning into the natural night …
and he might be right.
That friend, I think it is safe to say, was inattentive. If the Romantics sought to find the self in nature by accessing the Imagination (capital “I”) through the beauty and mysteries of the natural world, Baker has developed a post-Romantic meditation distinctly ecological and of our time (from the beginnings of late Capitalism to the present moment). His lyricism explores the theme of interconnection — looking at, listening to, and honoring life in the natural world insofar as these landscapes are marked and scarred by humans.
Baker’s poetics have not only crafted an argument about the sublime beauty of nature, but also about how the thick-headed, selfish, and greedy acts of humanity muck it all up. “Tract,” from The Truth about Small Towns (1998), begins “The political / trees are preparing // leaves for the bonfire” and arrives at an elegiac moment for what will soon be destroyed.” Technology as an artifact of time appears, momentarily, through a synecdoche that replaces people with their functionality: “Hardhats stand roadside, // pointing their car phones.” I admire how, in Baker’s hands, the technology of the time — car phones — does not read as outdated but rather a record of one more means of human (mis-)communication. Similarly, Baker’s gorgeous, long poem “Scavenger Loop,” from the book by that title, published almost 20 years later engages with the empty political engagement of a Facebook “like,” an innovation in human interaction that is already beginning to feel outdated (and, as we know now, post-2016 election, has been rife with corrupted information, even as it remains a small comfort, a networking device, and sometimes — though rarely — a real-world friend-making medium):
An hour ago on Facebook one newly
friended friend posted: Repeal Monsanto
Protection Act, as it “deregulates
the GMO industry from any
court oversight.” This states update was
“shared” from a status update which picked it
from someone else’s status, and so on.
Seventy-seven people “like” this post—
a record for me, my new friend comments
in the comment box of her own update.
A complex and mobile intimacy …
Swift is a collection of quick-moving poems that pursue silence and resist easy consumption. Just as the poems tonally undo the expectation of resolution, formally many of the poems resist such a reading through their length. Long poems request that the reader slow down and revel in how meaning builds over time like clouds tumbling over a mountain. As Edgar Allen Poe writes in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” “What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones — that is to say, of brief poetical effects.” For a long poem to work, it must gather together strands of impressions that I think of as narrative (though not the narrative of story, but of poetry, of the visual) and weave or wind them in a circle. The long poem must succeed with the intensity of image and emotion of a short poem, yet do this over a span. Baker has proven over the course of his career to have mastered these “brief poetical effects,” ultimately incorporating them into long poems such as “Scavenger Loop.” For example, “Haunts,” the title poem of Baker’s first collection of poetry published in 1985, explores the pristine, “bleached-bone white” landscape of rural Utah “these months / when hunger drives the herds / of whitetail and elk / down from higher country.” This kind of looking appears throughout “Scavenger Loop,” but particularly on the poem’s eighteenth page:
oak leaf hydrangeas and scrub trees
I’ve thinned out
for cosmetic sake, for fewer leaves to rake,
for more sun, thick grass (thus
the complexity of the whole
system diminished:
another positive feedback loop lost)
Baker’s long poems draw from Whitman and Keats, but also modernists like Eliot, Bishop, and especially Moore in Baker’s collage-like quotations of other texts and mastery of syllabics. In an age of tweets, the long poem is a radical form that forces us to reckon with time — through our attention to the form itself and also the long-form ecology of humanity’s interplay with the earth.
I had the pleasure of hearing Baker read — perform, really — the devastating, long poem “Scavenger Loop” at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in 2014. The performance has haunted me. The poem was set to music by the Los Angeles band, the River Song Quintet, in an arrangement for viola, cornet, trombone, guitar, and voice composed by Gregory Uhlmann, and in this way, “Scavenger Loop,” has taken on a whole new life. The poem begins with a “seasoned picker” dumpster diving in the heartland and moves through pesticides and monocultures, meth, the loss of a mother, fossil fuels, and Facebook “activism” through lines that cite, quote, break, drift. Whether or not a reader encounters the poem set to music, it breaks open the feeling of loss — of place, of the mother, of mother earth — and does so the most for me in this single line of the seventeenth page of the poem: “Tell me, where does it hurt? Everywhere else …”
A new and selected collection is the poet’s opportunity to curate their aesthetic and to create a story for themselves through their work by choosing what to include and what to cut. We re-encounter the then newly published and ambitious young writer along with the still striving, seasoned poet. Swift reintroduces the older poems into our current environmental and political landscape and reveals how the lyric speaker engages the natural world during moments of acute personal grief. “The City of God,” which explores a pregnancy loss from a father’s perspective, ends with one such reckoning:
We know it will
be this way always
— whatever fades —
and the dreadful wake.
Swift: New & Selected Poems not only illuminates Baker’s career-long attention to form — through syllabics and carefully crafted stanzas, and through the long poem — but also what comes after loss: grief, pain, and new beginnings. The voice sustaining this collection is a sonorous whole. We read about the life of a poet who has not only cared deeply for the environment, but also respected that nature is irrevocably human-marked. Swift shows us that when one searches most for the self, one must come face to face with this larger loss, too.
[Published by W.W. Norton on April 2, 2019, 160 pages, $26.95 hardcover]