Scavenger Loop: Poems

by David Baker

“[The] language . . . feels almost ancient solely by the skill with which Baker uses it.”― Los Angeles Review of Books In this masterful new work by “the most moving and expansive poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright” (Marilyn Hacker), David Baker constructs a layered natural history of his beloved Midwest and traces the complex story of human habitation from family and village life to the evolving nature of work and the mysterious habitats of the heart. At the center of Scavenger Loop is a sustained investigation of cycles and the natural recycling of things, and a discovery that even out of the discarded and the lost may come rebirth and renewal. In the process Baker reveals how everything bears the potential to be both invasive and life-giving: plants that beautify and conquer, chemicals that heal and destroy, words that mislead and instruct. Widely praised for his “impeccable formalism” ( Booklist ), Baker pushes to new stylistic methods, moving fluidly between unity and disorder, working at times in sustained narratives and intricate syllabics, at other times in fragments, cross-outs, and erasures. These poems praise and sing but are also clear-eyed in their documentation of destruction, the loss of human livelihood and natural habitat, the spreading threat of agri-business and unchecked development. From eco-poetics to the erotic, Scavenger Loop measures the dimensions of the pastoral and the elegy in contemporary lyric poetry.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 2015

About the author

David Baker is a poet, critic, and educator. He has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and more. Baker lives in Granville, Ohio, where he is emeritus professor of English at Denison University.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Baker is a poet of Midwest and its natural world, but is far more innovative and varied than one would immediately imagine for such poetic concerns. This is an extended pastoral that looks at the recursive nature of the landscape and human interactions with it. Baker often moves from the familiar to the alienating, allowing nature to encircle the human, intrude on us, and then us intrude upon it: suicide bombers, Monsanto, and simple human obliviousness leave“the complexity of the whole system diminished." Baker also does this by engagements with other poets and writers, his erasure of other poems which often send up superficial uses of erasures and their diminishing of other writers. He "translates" poets. While Baker has been known for formalism, his analogous forms here remind one of Olson as much as contemporary formalists.

[Cynthia Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm in love with David Baker's poetry, the way he uses nature to talk about every part of life, beautiful and sad and tragic and joyful. What humans have done, are doing, to nature, and how nature resists "Scavenger Loop"). The presence of the past, always among and between us. How nature's implacability is rendered majestic--like the comparison, in "Our Ivy", of a determined plant and a determined recurrence of cancer--even as it slays. I don't think I will ever be "finished" with this book. I have it within easy reach, always, especially when writing.

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry was interesting and thoughtful, but didn't touch my soul.

[Linda B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm learning a lot about poetry trends. I don't think I can achieve the level of pure music that Mr. Baker does in all his works.