Swift New and selected poems

IN A CELEBRATED PARAGRAPH from hIS 2016 book "The Elements of Eloquence," Mark Forsyth makes the eye-widening observation that English adjectives always appear in a specific order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. "And as size comes before color," he writes, "green great dragons can't exist." Perhaps, but there's a "blue tall bird" in David Baker's poetry, along with a "mercury blue-black still pond." Wild rye grasses throw a "green long shadow," and each trillium stem has its "fragile one bloom." The convenient thing about a native language is that you don't have to know its rules to obey them. Grammar is a piano you can play by ear, as Joan Didion has noted. But that unconscious facility can be a limitation for poets, who hope to startle and reorient the language, to use grammar without being used by it. It's a risk that Baker recognizes. For close to 40 years - on the evidence gathered in "Swift: New and Selected Poems" - he's been working to see and describe things as though for the first time. He can lay down an elegant line when he wants to, but he favors an authenticating roughness to a consoling smoothness; when euphony and precision are at cross-purposes in his writing, euphony yields. Baker is a poet of the natural world who would probably reject that label because what other world is there? Transience and interconnectedness are his big themes. The extreme suburbs and the diminishing countryside are his settings. Attention and juxtaposition are his methods; his metaphors don't seem so much made as noticed. To read his poem "The Spring Ephemerals" is to gradually register that its title refers to everything in it: the wildflowers, the carcinoma-scarred woman who is busily transplanting them, the woods where they've been growing, and the developers who are burning those woods to clear lots for a new subdivision: She kneels as the sunlight cuts through pine needles above us, casting a grid like the plats the surveyors use. It's the irony of every cell: that it divides to multiply Suburbs are fertile ground for such juxtapositions, with their abutments and encroachments. Deer and coyotes roam freely through the book's backyards, reminding property owners who the trespassers are: I have found only the gnawed and spat splatter of hedge apples, that's how desperate they are, driven toward us by nothing to forage, by vanishing trees and razed fields, by exurbs, by white- flight and our insatiate hunger for size and space and tax advantages. "Late Pastoral" is the name of that poem, and of Baker's game. There's a visual geometry to much of Baker's poetry, which he achieves by counting syllables rather than stresses. (Zoology isn't the only enthusiasm he shares with Marianne Moore.) The poems are platted rather than measured. And the collection itself has a similar symmetry, with each of his previous books represented by exactly seven poems (and seven total from his first two). He arranges this work from latest to earliest, an unusual choice that might seem less significant in another poet's new-and-selected. But Baker is both an autobiographical poet and one obsessed with ephemerality, which makes the book's reverse chronology curiously affecting: Parents die and then decline. A marriage ends, then flourishes. A child grows younger. Her parents decide not to have a child yet. It's as though the book's structure were another protest against time's passage and the world's degradation. Baker's style, too, grows greener as the book progresses (or "retrogresses," perhaps - because time moves forward, there's a dearth of words for this sort of thing). Mastery in the middle becomes promise at the end. The oldest poems are recognizably his, but they haven't all earned their earnestness yet: And sometime in those meaningful hours, we who have never found a use for the thing except to mismanage its name, as is our bitter nature, did not hear the hedge apple at last let go. Thud. Baker has been skillfully subverting the "natural order" of language for years, but his recent work is his most disjunctive: "[where is that he said]- / [where are- he said-we]- / too a distant bell / too a distant bell-." This is clearly a considered choice; in the book's 15 new poems, Baker confronts extinctions both global and local, including the loss of both parents. Like their speakers, these poems are pretty broken up. I find them well made but less distinctive, on the whole, than most of his mature work. When sentences take leaves of absence from contemporary poetry, they're rarely replaced by something novel. Usually it's just other familiar units of composition - clauses, phrases, litanies - that happen to lack the purchase and propulsion of sentences: The permanent havoc of little mistakes. A hip full of pins and surgery scars. The hit-spit of a bluegill the cotton- wood seeds small branches greening the old shoe eddying swallows the heat. Such writing may have the immediacy of unprocessed experience, but unprocessed experience is pretty familiar, too. More to the point, it's a style that deprives Baker of his strengths, which include storytelling - he's wonderful at smuggling narrative into what look like meditative poems - and the skillful collocation of lines, sentences and stanzas. Baker has spent his life learning how to let a complex moment unfold slowly across a poem, and he's good at it: Consider the beech, the lovers' owne tree, this one, yes, hearts scored-in and someone's, and someone else's, initials so swollen they're unreadable and more-than-head high-up the trunk. All of Baker's poems are rich in observation, imagination and memory. But it's syntax that allows him to synthesize those elements, and to catch his own mind in the act of doing so. "The world gives you itself in fragments / in splinters," Baker writes. In his best poems, generously represented here, he builds something lovely and durable from that brokenness.

Poems about birds amount to a genre. Two masterpiece anthologies, The Bird/Poem Book (1970) and The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry (1980), attest to the fact, and some poets' self-selections of their own work to wit, Baker's glorify it. There are also plenty of deer, butterflies, bees, frogs, and horses in Baker's poems, along with trees and flowers. But he is not any kind of biologist, and parents failing and dying, a young daughter with a hyperactivity disorder, a remembered embrace, near-crashes on the highway (one with another car, another with a bird), and other significant human events also figure in them. Much hunting, foraging, and scavenging goes on; much maintenance of land and waters, too. Baker's would be a poetry of a place except that the place is general, perhaps anywhere from Maine to the Midwest and out to Oregon that is on the edge of the rural. This place is a space for the entire life cycle of nonhumans and for the anxieties of observant humans. (Just what is happening to the bees?) Perhaps any North American will recognize it, even intimately. With each poem delicately and sturdily crafted, this collection creates one of the great spaces in American poetry.--Ray Olson Copyright 2019 Booklist