Skilled at both extended narratives and intense, intimate lyrics, David Baker combines his talents in his fifth collection of poems. Working in syllabics, sonnets, couplets, and free verse, Baker can write unflinchingly about love, illness, madness, and perseverance.
His small towns are the burgs of the Midwest, where there is a constant tension between a future that’s coming and a past that may never vanish. The grocer on the corner now carries mango chutney, and the city council must decide—Wendy’s or wetlands.
From these rural towns, Baker evokes lovers, mothers and fathers, highway workmen, hospital patients, and the long dead. He spots the inner struggles of everyday living, as in these lines from “The Women”: “there comes a rubbing of hands, and not as in cleaning. / As when something’s put away, but it won’t stay down.”
Regional in the best sense, Baker’s poems capture the universal human commerce of love and conflict enduring under the water towers and storefronts of America’s heartland.
Neighbors in October at The Writer’s Almanac
David Baker is author or editor of fourteen books of poetry and criticism. He holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair at Denison University, teaches regularly in the Warren Wilson College MFA program, and is the poetry editor of the Kenyon Review.
“These powerful, lyrical poems set out to measure the distances between memory and reality, between the living and the dead. The measurement is accomplished in beautiful cadences and gritty detail. Here are locust trees and early snowfalls. Here are small towns, with their metaphoric boredom and expectation and dearness. All the contemporary details are fresh and striking. But the real achievement here is that we are invited to stand on the boundary between the lived world and the lost one and, as we read on, it is hard to distinguish between them. David Baker has an unswerving purpose in these poems. And he draws us into it.”
—Eavan Boland
“While there are many ways to read David Baker’s marvelous and richly textured new book, The Truth about Small Towns, it’s first and foremost a book about love—lost love and abiding love, the joys of love and the sacrifices. Baker deftly traces the ways love for those who are absent threads through the love for those still here, and makes it stronger. ‘We are,’ he says, ‘part and parcel / of a great recession, / souls in sequence / bearing our dead / on our backs, / like relic radiation / from creation’s / first blaze. . . .’ In this, his finest book yet, David Baker shoulders the burden.”
—Andrew Hudgins
1998 Ohioana Poetry Award
