Whale Fall: Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“The craft of Whale Fall defies. It asserts, for me, a definition of poetry: an unbearable gulf of feeling made indelible by form.”—Diane Seuss, Paris Review
A masterful and moving new volume from a “peerless poet of the natural world” (New York Times Book Review).
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A virtuoso of eco-poetry and acoustics, Baker (Swift) meditates on the nonpareil majesty of the planet with rigorous consideration and reverence. He considers what molds and anchors the soul—emptiness, solitude, sound, love, and mortality, perceiving the intrinsic life of the physical world and complementing this thinking with impressive knowledge of flora and fauna. With death on his mind, he recognizes the impulse to evade its approach ("We live in one time but think in another") but focuses on the splendor of the present ("in the small brain/ of extinct summers let us be like beaks/ among dark berries along ancient boughs/ even now the clocks in their feather gloves/ are measuring space for the new graveyards"). Dually affirming and humbling, Baker redefines legacy: "When you are gone they will read your footprints...// all that's left of this life is what remains/ for the next." Baker's careful, captivating writing sinks under the skin, summoning a long-forgotten need for stillness, wonder, and attention to the sacrosanctity of the world.