Whale Fall: Poems - Hardcover

by David Baker (Author)

Acclaimed as an essential voice of the American Midwest, David Baker expands both his environment and his form in his eleventh collection. Whale Fall is about time, measured in the wingbeats of a hummingbird or the epochs of geological change, and about place, whether a backyard in Ohio or the slopes of a melting glacier.

In the exquisite, musical title poem, a deft hybrid of eco-poetic alarm and intimate narrative, Baker transports us to the deep sea as a single gray whale carcass falls, decays, and is reinhabited by a cosmos of teeming lives. Among the strands of ocean health, microplastics, and related calamities of human disregard, the poet weaves in a personal story of chronic illness. The result is a stirring, confident work, astonishing in its emotional acuity and lyric range.

Each poem in Whale Fall is an echolocation, emitting its music to situate itself among others in the vastness of the world. Amidst climate change and catastrophe, as amidst a blooming viburnum or a viral disease, these poems send their songs across empty spaces of a line, a page, or a continent, to see who is out there, moving in the depths of being.

Back Jacket

Praise for David Baker

"[David Baker's] work evinces the moral courage of keeping still in the landscape: in our era of climate change, poetry's mandate to measure the rhythms of the year has become a valuable form of witness.... He is heir to such writers as Henry David Thoreau... and Robert Frost. To read Baker's poems collected... is to appreciate the full range of their formal resources, their attunement to cycles and processes rather than to mere outcomes and effects."
-- Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"Baker has spent his life learning how to let a complex moment unfold slowly across a poem. All of [his] poems are rich in observation, imagination, and memory."
-- Eric McHenry, New York Times Book Review

"It's as if Baker can't write an off-key phrase, even in the midst of impassioned indictment.... [His] is a towering poetic consciousness, akin to Nature itself."
-- Carol Muske-Dukes, Huffington Post