{"id":11210,"date":"2020-03-03T11:43:56","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T10:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11210"},"modified":"2020-03-03T11:48:11","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T10:48:11","slug":"david-baker-swift-new-and-selected-poems-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11210","title":{"rendered":"David Baker |<em><strong> Swift: New and Selected Poems<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>David Baker | <em> Swift: New and Selected Poems<\/em> | Norton $26.95<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-right: 10px;\" src=\"https:\/\/i.postimg.cc\/PqJKb5cw\/40180070.jpg\" width=\"220\" align=\"left\" \/><\/p>\n<p>David Baker\u2019s first Selected Poems, <em>Treatise on Touch<\/em>, was published by Arc in the UK in 2007.  <em>Treatise on Touch<\/em> introduced the British poetry public to that rarer American poet, the formalist.  If there is an obvious lineage into which David Baker fits, it is the Anthony Hecht\/John Hollander axis of 20th century American poetry.  That is not to say that Baker is not capable of fine, and finely calibrated free verse; however, Baker\u2019s natural inclination is away from the long-lined, loose-limbed verse of, say, Ashbery and Donnelly.  Baker\u2019s temperament is much more towards the condensed and the lyrical.  Like Baker\u2019s other <em>Selected<\/em>, this book is arranged in reverse, Merlinesque, chronological order.  That arrangement is, I suspect, to show us where the mature work of Baker has come from, with the emphasis on the current.  It was often the lament of the great jazz musicians, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane were two, that listeners were only interested in their past \u2018hits\u2019.  As Ellington put it, \u2018What I do tomorrow will be the best thing I\u2019ve ever done.\u2019<strong>*<\/strong> Of course, the reader of this volume does have the choice of starting at the back and thumbing forward, or accepting Baker\u2019s arrangement for the emphasis he gives it. In addition, as is the way of these things, poems that were in the earlier <em>Treatise on Touch<\/em> have been winnowed out of the new book.  Thus, in this volume, Baker has left out all the poems from his first book and severely curtailed the representation of subsequent volumes.  There are, however, fifteen new poems which \u2018preface\u2019, so to speak, the other selected poems.  <\/p>\n<p>Another major difference between Baker\u2019s work and, actually, all of the other writers named above is that Baker is much more of a nature poet.  And Baker is the kind of nature poet who sees himself in that tradition.  The notes of this volume mention Emerson, in particular, his great essay, \u2018Nature\u2019, Virgil, in particular the <em>Eclogues<\/em>.  There is also something of the feel of A.R. Ammons and Wendell Berry about some of these poems, even if Baker eschews Ammons\u2019 easy-going, fluid style.  That feel for nature has been in Baker\u2019s work from the beginning. And part of his sense of his writing in that tradition is the way he will quote, sometimes extensively, from earlier writers.  For example, one of the fine poems that Baker has excluded from the current volume is \u2018Ephemerae\u2019, which describes the rise and swift death of these insects and also quotes from the eighteenth-century American naturalist, William Bartram.  <\/p>\n<p>The earliest of Baker\u2019s poems in this volume is \u2018Haunts\u2019 in which Baker reflects on the discovery in mountains of the body of a hunter some 27 years after his disappearance.  The discovery coincides with Baker\u2019s 27th birthday, whereupon Baker explores a sense of haunting.  The poem contains Baker\u2019s trademark, lovely phrasemaking, \u2018puffing hard, a ghost \/ of breath shredding in the wind\u2019, \u2018The snow packed deeper \/ into the breaking shapes \/ of the firs\u2019; and finishes with the following: <\/p>\n<p>He will stay there <\/p>\n<p>finally too cold to shiver,<br \/>\nrelaxing, gun on lap,<br \/>\nand look over the beautiful, sweeping<br \/>\nemptiness the world has become<br \/>\nfor all of my life. <\/p>\n<p>In the middle of this, is a passage in italics in which Baker as narrator recites episodes around his birth, in particular, the baby\u2019s interaction with the elderly landlady.  This poem illustrates another of Baker\u2019s skills, which is the way in which he handles the mixing and mixture of registers.  In this poem, it is a delicate shift from one narrative to another.  <\/p>\n<p>In the middle of <em>Swift<\/em>, there are poems from the individual volume, \u2018Midwest Eclogue\u2019. The reminiscence between these poems and Virgil\u2019s originals is emphasised by David Baker\u2019s placing of human concerns in the midst of landscape.  However, where Virgil\u2019s <em>Eclogues<\/em> were often reflections of the ars poetica, itself, and its virtues and vices, Baker\u2019s \u2018Midwest Eclogue\u2019 shows people simply in thrall to the natural world.  This dependence is often of the conservationist kind;  the figures in this landscape are often desperate to protect it.  In the title poem of this group, the narrator works to rehabilitate a \u2018dying\u2019 pond, next to his property.  Actually, the feel of most of Baker\u2019s work is that the first-person narrator is Baker, himself.  And, as with the other poems in the group, there is a detailed description of process, of the actual getting one\u2019s hands dirty in nature.  In the pared, stepped lines of this poem, we are told, <\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\t\tAt first we tried sprinkling<br \/>\n\t&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;chemicals around<br \/>\n&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\tthe darkening perimeter \u2013 to wit <\/p>\n<p>copper sulfate penta-<br \/>\n&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\thydrate (CuSo4 \u00b7 5H2O),<br \/>\n&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\tused variously as<br \/>\nmicronized fungicide in pellets,<br \/>\n&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\ta crystalline pesticide \u201cnoted<br \/>\n&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\tfor acute toxicity in bees,\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In other, less-skilled, hands, the focus on the scientific register would seem simply that.  Here, we can see Baker placing the language within a controlled context, \u2018the darkening perimeter\u2019, itself using a scientific term.  And it is not only the breaking of the scientific names across lines, or the actuality of the formula, but the way the terminology leads into that final devastating quotation.  Baker shows the reader the relationship between language of the terminology and the jargon of environmental destruction;  it is almost the language itself which leads to the destruction of the bees.  <\/p>\n<p>Some of that sense of how language both mirrors and enables dysfunction is shown in the poem \u2018Five Odes on Absence\u2019.  The first of these \u2018odes\u2019 reports on a poetry reading at which poets \u2018\u201d\u2026read from \/ and display their latest or landmark e- \/ rasures.\u201c Which means: take Dickinson, rub \/ some letters our, you can be famous, too.\u2019 It is clear that such a poetry \u2018procedure\u2019 has got Baker\u2019s goat.  However, that kind of cheapening of technique starts Baker on a reflection on the way other absences are present in lives. One of those kinds of absences is in the life of John Clare, another writer whose letters pulled out the vowels, and whose notebooks and drafts are full of the search to find the right word to counter absences, lacunae as we would call them now, in the ability of language to make precise.  Baker feels that Clare\u2019s sense of absences in the natural world and in the friendships he once had are mirrored in the rage of the narrator\u2019s neighbour\u2019s son, Bernard, whose mother is absent. And there is an aesthetic similarity, too, in the still lives of the painter Giorgio Morandi with his famous paintings of bottles and jugs; \u2018painting \/ everything around the bottle but not \/ the bottle.  This is how it always is. \/ Wherever I am I am what is missing \/ \u2026 I feel I am \u2013 I only am \/ And plod upon the earth as dull and void:\u2019 It is as if Morandi\u2019s still lives, for Baker, portray the loneliness of John Clare.  <\/p>\n<p>There is from the beginning of <em>Swift<\/em>, a very strong sense of Baker\u2019s identifying with Clare, whose profound empathy with the natural world animates so much of this writing.  And if this empathy finds its context in a world of climate change and loss of habitat, Baker\u2019s purpose is to celebrate that natural world in the way that Clare did; to value its fragility and its strength, and to look to nature for a kind a guidance, a way forward. <\/p>\n<p><strong>By Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>*<\/strong>Apologies to Gilles Peterson. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Baker | Swift: New and Selected Poems | Norton $26.95 David Baker\u2019s first Selected Poems, Treatise on Touch, was published by Arc in the UK in 2007. Treatise on Touch introduced the British poetry public to that rarer American poet, the formalist. If there is an obvious lineage into which David Baker fits, it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>David Baker | Swift: New and Selected Poems | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11210\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"David Baker | Swift: New and Selected Poems | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"David Baker | Swift: New and Selected Poems | Norton $26.95 David Baker\u2019s first Selected Poems, Treatise on Touch, was published by Arc in the UK in 2007. 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