Never-Ending Birds: Poems [Hardcover]

David Baker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 5, 2009

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

Part map, part travelogue, part chronicle, part autobiography, Never-Ending Birds explores a variety of landscapes from Midwestern villages to the boroughs of big cities. Steeped in story—divorce, loss, raising a child, uncovering old worlds and new loves—these poems are gracefully lived in, lived through, with mystery and beauty.

from “Never-Ending Birds”:
That’s us pointing to the clouds. Those are clouds
of birds, now we see, one whole cloud of birds.
There we are, pointing out the car windows.
October. Gray-blue-white olio of birds.
Never-ending birds, you called the first time—
years we say it, the three of us, any
two of us, one of those just endearments.
Apt clarities. Kiss on the lips of hope.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Well observed, careful and shot through with sadness, this eighth set of poems from Ohio resident Baker (Midwest Eclogue) is his best: syllabic stanzas, occasional rhyme, and short, clear looks at nature frame a life that almost came apart in middle age: we read of the poet's days with his young daughter, and of what appears to be his recent divorce. When a lark flies/ up, I know its name, writes Baker—it is no boast: he returns over and over to the natural history of the Midwest, its meadows and exurbs, where Hummer means both a tiny bird and a gargantuan vehicle. Baker's daughter's childhood, his own teen years, middle age and approaching death get attention from his exacting eye. And as he looks hard at animals, they look back at him: he sees, in a poem about Virgil, how the oval eyes/ of goats and sheep/ turn rounder as the day/ goes down. Like Marianne Moore and Amy Clampitt, this poet likes to borrow from earlier texts: swaths of quotations from 17th-century prose can overwhelm his quiet verse. Yet most of the time Baker's terms remain his own: To see each thing clear/ is still not to see// a thing apart from/ words or our wild need. (Oct.)
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Review

This book [is] sharper and stronger than the calmer poems that Baker has written before. . . . His poems show a life almost helplessly regretful, fortunate in obvious ways, yet excruciating in its limits. (Stephen Burt - The Believer )

Well observed, careful, and shot through with sadness, this eighth set of poems . . . is [Baker’s] best. (Publishers Weekly ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393070182
• ISBN-13: 978-0393070187
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,178,296 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Joy, grief and savoir faire, October 10, 2009

By 

Pam Dauber - See all my reviews

This review is from: Never-Ending Birds: Poems (Hardcover)

David Baker's remarkable new book of poems is a quietly lyrical, heart-felt journey through divorce--and out again, into a world of joy and mystery. Part autobiography, part chronicle, the collection is cunningly written in apparent free-verse lines that are anything but "free." The sly blank verse "is remarkable"--as James Reiss comments in his October 1 review: "ars est celere artem."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing., September 15, 2009

By 

J. Wahlgren "j paris" (boston) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Never-Ending Birds: Poems (Hardcover)

This book is expansive & polished, the topics covered are wonderful & handled in a delicate manner. There is hate & love & nature, all weaved together in a cohesive bunch. This is my first book of David Baker's that I've owned, & I don't have a single regret. This makes me want to strive to write more elegant & expansive myself.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy This Book, April 25, 2010

By 

Terry R. Hummer "TR Hummer" (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Never-Ending Birds: Poems (Hardcover)

This is David Baker's best book of poems yet, and that's saying a lot. it's lean and yet rich; it's accurate and clear and yet deeply mysterious; it's beautiful and dignified and yet full of breakage, slippage, and pain: at once dignified and (in the best sense, if there is a best sense) abject. Abject in the strict sense: something cast off: The Book of Molting he might have titled it. And it has a lot of birds in it.

There are so many excellences here that it seems almost churlish to single anything out, but if I had to pick one poem from the book as my favorite, it would be "Tis a Fayling." There's a poem to marvel at. It does something unprecedented, which is to make all the voices in the poem--which are disparate--into one voice, while at the same time allowing each its proper scope and scale, the historic voices finally becoming the narrator's voice in the present. The psychological/dramatic/lyric achievement here is stunning.