Truth about Small Towns: Poems

by David Baker

Winner of the 1998 Ohioana Poetry Award

Skilled at both extended narratives and intense, intimate lyrics, David Baker combines his talents in his fifth collection of poems. Working in syllabics, sonnets, couplets, and free verse, Baker can write unflinchingly about love, illness, madness, and perseverance.
His small towns are the burgs of the Midwest, where there is a constant tension between a future that’s coming and a past that may never vanish. The grocer on the corner now carries mango chutney, and the city council must decide—Wendy’s or wetlands. From these rural towns, Baker evokes lovers, mothers and fathers, highway workmen, hospital patients, and the long dead. He spots the inner struggles of everyday living, as in these lines from “The Women”: “there comes a rubbing of hands, and not as in cleaning. / As when something’s put away, but it won’t stay down.” Regional in the best sense, Baker’s poems capture the universal human commerce of love and conflict enduring under the water towers and storefronts of America’s heartland.

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1998

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

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lost interest, reads more like various rantings.

[Auxilia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mr. Baker's book is a series of poems, all of different styles, that are meant (I believe) to capture the diverse experiences of people living in Anytown, USA. He is said to follow the lineage of Whitman, Emerson, and Frost.

With full disclosure that I am a true novice in terms of reading and interpreting poetry, I must confess that I found this book disappointing.

First, none of the poems stood out to me; I honestly cannot even find a line or two that resonated. But more critically, rather than the promised roller coaster of "love, illness, madness, and perseverance," every single poem felt bleak and somber. Instead of the sense of "shared loneliness" evoked by those aforementioned poets, I felt only a the grimness of UNshared (and irremediable!) alienation when slogging through these poems, which were simultaneously obfuscating and unsettling. Actually, The closest analogs I can think of are the novels of William Faulkner which, when I attempted to read them in middle school, left me feeling depressed without being able to fully articulate why.

It seems unfair to judge Mr. Baker's ability given his widely recognized talent. But if you, too, are a starry-eyed amateur hoping for a series of poems that promise the profundity of classic greats reimagined in a modern context, I suspect you will be disappointed, and I would encourage you to read some samples before committing to this book.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can just see him reading it.