Two Poems:
"Monarchs Landing and Flying"
"White Heron Pond"
from David Baker's
Midwest Eclogue

David Baker:

David Baker was born in Bangor, Maine, and has spent more than forty years of his life in the Midwest. He has authored seven volumes of poetry, including, most recently, Changeable Thunder, and he is the poetry editor for The Kenyon Review. An Ohio resident for over twenty years, he currently lives and gardens in Granville with his wife, the poet Ann Townsend, and daughter. He is a professor of English at Denison University, where he holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing. (Photo by Ann Townsend)

About Midwest Eclogue:

"The most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright."
— Marilyn Hacker

Midwest Eclogue is a profound dialogue between the heartland and the heart by one of our most gifted poets. Inspired by the landscape of the Midwest, David Baker's landscape of human passions – similarly haunted by roots and wings – is rendered in a rich and polyphonic craft. The oldest eclogues were rural poems, competitions in song between shepherds whiling away the time. Baker's poetry originates in rural Ohio; his devotions are erotic and familial, natural and environmental, literary and social. John Clare and George Catlin coexist in this heartland eclogue, conversing with Virgil, Isaac Newton, and a neighbor just down the road who paints "Welcome to Aliens" in bold letters on the side of her barn. Other presences range from close family members to the citizens of the second world in which the poet lives, the world of ideas, science, and art. Baker's poems accumulate into a vibrant, inclusive, and moving lyric conversation.

"David Baker moves from strength to strength, and here is the breakthrough volume his readers have long been expecting. All of its elements were there before – the tenderness, the insight, the gorgeous, resilient devotion to form – but never before assembled to this pitch and amplitude. Midwest Eclogue is a heartening, humanizing work of mindfulness in an ever-more-oblivious time. I read these poems so that the world shall not be lost on me."
— Linda Gregerson

"Informed by an exuberant imagination both completely contemporary and impressively historical in its modes of exploration, this moving and startling new collection is an extended meditation upon mortality, continuance, and the sheer variety of human existence. David Baker's comprehensions are beautiful, inventive, learned, musical, and wise."
— Jane Hirshfield

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: