Customer Reviews

Never-Ending Birds: Poems

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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."

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.

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.