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ÔThis collection
is lyric poetry at its bestÕ. I always understood ÔlyricÕ meant poetry that
was lyrical; poetry that sang on the page; poetry with a strong metrical
rhythm. Well, this volume never employs rhyme, nor any of the
traditionally-recognized verse forms; though maybe approaching some at times.
What it does have in many of the poems is a lyrical energy - so I
suppose that that is what the blurb means to convey. And at the heart of this
lyrical energy is a singular love. It seems, at times, almost as if the poet
is writing a single love poem to one woman: an extended poem sprinkled and
dispersed throughout most of the other poems. While the other feature that
stands out, and often relates to this on-going love poem, is that the poet
circumvents the primary ÔIÕ of the lyric by slipping into various voices - something
of ColeridgeÕs Ôventriloquising for the truthÕ.
David Baker is a poet whom Marilyn Hacker (her name seemingly misspelled on
the cover) describes as Ôthe most expansive and moving poet to come out of
the American Midwest since James WrightÕ. And certainly those who know
WrightÕs work wonÕt quarrel with that. Wright, too, was a lyric - if not
always lyrical - poet who wrote of that gasoline-flavored
but essentially pastoral world of which Baker also writes. But, also,
HackerÕs word ÔexpansiveÕ suggests an even greater influence on Baker among
earlier American poets, namely, Walt Whitman. Whitman brought a unique sense
of democratic openness to American poetry that fitted perfectly with a
frontier, pastoral, plainsmanÕs landscape that, yet, spilled over into the
great burgeoning cities of the USA. There is that feel too to the work of
David Baker. And although there are no big city, urban poems here, ÔThe Truth
about Small TownsÕ hints at a poet who would be quite at ease with the
Whitman (of whom he writes) Ôstopping.../to stroll the Bowery running with
dock boys/ and street whores...Õ; and a poet who brings the same Whitmanesque
clear-eyed observation of people and place:
It never
stops raining. The water towerÕs tarnished
as cutlery
left damp in the widowerÕs hutch.
If you walk
slow (but donÕt stop), youÕre not from nearby.
All you can
eat for a buck at the diner is
cream gravy
on sourdough, blood sausage, and coffee.
Never lie.
The preacher before this one dropped bombs
in the war
and walked with a limp at parade time.
Until it
burned, the old depot was a disco.
A cafe. A
card shoppe. A parts place for combines.
Randy + Rhoda
shows up each spring on the bridge.
If you walk
too fast you did it. NothingÕs more lonesome
than money.
(Who says shoppe?) It never rains.
Or this from a poem entitled simply ÔPatrioticsÕ:
Yesterday a
little girl got slapped to death by her daddy,
out of
work, alcoholic, and estranged two towns downriver.
America, itÕs
hard to get your attention politely.
America,
the beautiful night is about to blow up
and the cop
who brought the man down with a single shot in the chops
is shaking
hands, dribbling chaw across his sweaty shirt,
and pointing
cars across the courthouse grass to park....
But back to the question of the lyric-al. Baker may be a poet both out of and completely
within the tradition of free verse, but the sweet (a favourite word of his),
tender power of his writing - its feelingfulness - brings that
free verse musically alive:
Now, while
your head lolls in my lap, lightly,
and your
shoulders soften with the talcum of sleep,
not a breath
stirs the fern at the window, not a breeze,
only the
muted, underwater blue of the TV
trying to
sell back my soul, all self-love and loathing.
But sometimes,
when I hold still enough, you reach
from the
regions of sleepers and whisper a moment
the nonsense
I love, soft twitters
like sparrows
sipping, or a sigh,
or whole
landscapes of jabber in phrases so clear
I think you
are singing. I want to go where
youÕve gone
to lie so purely at peace.
That was from the somewhat saccharine-titled ÔOur August MoonÕ; but note the
gentle alliteration of that first line. Of even more exquisite beauty is this
passage from ÔCardinals In SpringÕ, a poem subtitled significantly Ôafter
WhitmanÕ (poetÕs itallics):
When we
stand, as we must, when the silence
and fragrant
calm settle over us all, as surely they must,
and the caps
come off and our hands flutter up
to our felt
hearts, when we begin to sing
in a voice so
singular it redoubles, echoing off the sky,
we stretch
ourselves proud and pulsing, and the music,
like an
organic truth, throbs through our veins and temples,
and over the land of the free, over the
vendors and hawkers,
over athletes
and umps, the fireworks blossom
into
smoke-puffs and thunder like the storms of creation.
Though David Baker can be said to align himself with the Romantics - there are
poems here to Shelley and to Emerson, for instance - realistic matters get frequent treatment
in his poems. This is a 14-liner called ÔStrokeÕ:
In the lilac
light, in the lengthening pulse of sorrow
so profound
it was nothing, a numbness, she settled
one foot for
the last time in the brickway dusts.
This took no
time at all. Shadow and substance
vanished in
the lightening moment so near to evening.
There is a
terror that starts low in the throat
and chokes
out even itself. It is clear or conclusive -
the way her other foot followed
as if to confirm,
like the
heartÕs two beats complete and imprinted.
She will take
this step every moment for the rest of my life.
She will not
walk from the porchlight and spring again.
There is a
long calm that settles every crisis.
There is a
bubble in the blood, tiny and clear,
singing
through the stream on its way to the brain.
Like Bernard OÕDonoghueÕs poem ÔThe WeaknessÕ, this brings out the essential
drama of the dying moment. It also emphasises, in its way, the link between
the lyric and the dramatic.
Of the more realistic poems in this volume, ÔStill-Hildreth Sanitorium, 1936Õ
seems to me the finest. Too long to quote in full, it begins:
When she
wasnÕt on rounds, she was counting
the silver
and bedpans, the pills in white cups,
heads in
their beds, or she was scrubbing down
walls
streaked with faeces and food on a white-
wash of hours
past midnight and morning, down
corridors
quickened with shadows, with screaming,
the laminate
of cheap disinfectant....
The first
time I saw them strapped in those beds,
caked with
sores, some of them crying
or coughing
up coal, some held in place
with
cast-iron weights...
Perhaps in some ways one of the most surprising and - dare I suggest it? - unusual
things about this poetÕs work, despite its several dialogues with literary
figures of the past, is the total absence of any traces of academic
obfuscation. This, despite the fact that he has considerable experience of
working in academia. The only other living American poet with whom David
Baker has affinity in both his agrarian background and his non-academicism is
Wendell Berry. There may be others, of course? Ted Kooser may be another? But,
certainly, there are not many poets who spend a deal of time working in
academia who are as free from its influence as David Baker. His writing
motivation, so to speak, is best expressed by Edward Hirsch who wrote, ÔThese
beautifully-shaped poems are fuelled by a deep human desire to rescue the
transient moment and memorialize feeling...Õ; and though I am tempted to
quibble a little with the phrase beautifully-shapedÕ, I whole heartedly
endorse the rest. And commend the book as a whole.
© William
Oxley 2007
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