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Whale Fall: Poems
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.
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.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Hardcover
Published July 19, 2022
9 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
About the author
David Baker
19 books11 followersDavid 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.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 14, 2022
I'm so glad I bought this book and then got to hear David read from it at Denison. What a special time that was.
July 14, 2022
As always, and I seriously cannot believe this has not been fixed yet, I have to preface a poetry review by noting that the Kindle does not keep the formatting of the poet. If I read a poem on my Paperwhite, lines end on one word; on my IPad vertically on another, and on my IPad if I read horizontally. It’s incredibly frustrating and that’s as a reader. As a writer I’d be infuriated. C’mon Amazon; it’s way past the time to fix this.
Anyway, obviously I won’t be talking much about structure, line breaks (the ones I quote may or may not be correctly shown), enjambment, etc. Because who knows?
David Baker’s Whalefall runs the gamut in terms of length for its poems, some running a handful of lines while the title piece runs well over a dozen pages. If the pieces vary in length, they’re more cohesive in terms of subject, with nature coming under the focus of a sharply focused eye and activist mind. Other subjects include time and illness.
Baker’s sound sense is evident right at the start, as in “The Telling”, with the assonance of “the old ice that stones can hold the one note of”, that “O” sound continuing throughout the poem’s brief length. Or in the opening of “Mullein”, which makes use of both assonance and consonance: “A single stalk/by the side of the creek/I put my hand in/Cold water the color of clouds.” There’s a musicality that runs throughout the work that even casual poetry readers (I put myself in that category) will respond to even if they have some difficulty with the fragmentary nature of some the poems, the back and forth between scenes/subject in some, or the precise language, which can drop into the arcane and/or scientific, as again in “Mullein” when Baker names Verbascum thapsus. Sometimes the specificity is a litany, as when he offers up this list “avocets, stilts, willets, killdeers, coots, phalaropes, rails, tule wrens, yellowheaded black birds, black terns . . . “
The title poem, meanwhile, moves back and forth between the scientific language, reportage style, and a more intimate one as we follow in one thread the carcass of a whale dropping ever so slowly through the depth zones of an ocean. It opens in the former: “One dies. /Eschrichtius robustus, gray/of the sole living genus, of baleen, of the family Eschrichtiidae.” Later, the reportage arrives: “July, 29, 2013: a sperm whale found deceased on the beach of a small island off the coast of the Netherlands . . . “And then the intimate, personal description of the speaker’s illness: “Weeks I couldn’t sleep. Years I couldn’t waken . . . it’s coming back one more . . . the viral fire, the toxic sea.” With that last word acting as a bridge to the other moments, one which circles back in another section the whalefall that follows the corpse through “the hypotoxic haze.” The poem is a masterclass in movement.
Some readers might be frustrated by the vocabulary, others might glide throughout without concern over knowing “exactly” what is meant (though most times Baker offers contextual clues or out and out explanations), and still others will look them up — Baker allows for all the options.
Nor does he shy away from simpler lines, simple at least in syntax and vocabulary and form, though they carry a larger weight. Lines that linger with the readers like “What you call a thing is seldom what it is.” Or ones that will call up a reader’s own memories, regrets: “I wish I had spoken when it matters, but who can know each time when to call or keep still?”
It's lines like these, along with the vivid precision of observational moments, and the musicality that one can drift along with though in perhaps-ignorance of meaning that always has me tell people who “don’t like poetry” to just read to find what strikes them rather than worrying about what so many recall from school — trying to “puzzle” out the “exact meaning.” Regular poetry readers will admire and respond to Baker’s level of craft and construction here, but casual or non-poetry readers should not be intimidated by the genre name and instead dive on in. Baker offers up more than enough to reward both types of readers.
Anyway, obviously I won’t be talking much about structure, line breaks (the ones I quote may or may not be correctly shown), enjambment, etc. Because who knows?
David Baker’s Whalefall runs the gamut in terms of length for its poems, some running a handful of lines while the title piece runs well over a dozen pages. If the pieces vary in length, they’re more cohesive in terms of subject, with nature coming under the focus of a sharply focused eye and activist mind. Other subjects include time and illness.
Baker’s sound sense is evident right at the start, as in “The Telling”, with the assonance of “the old ice that stones can hold the one note of”, that “O” sound continuing throughout the poem’s brief length. Or in the opening of “Mullein”, which makes use of both assonance and consonance: “A single stalk/by the side of the creek/I put my hand in/Cold water the color of clouds.” There’s a musicality that runs throughout the work that even casual poetry readers (I put myself in that category) will respond to even if they have some difficulty with the fragmentary nature of some the poems, the back and forth between scenes/subject in some, or the precise language, which can drop into the arcane and/or scientific, as again in “Mullein” when Baker names Verbascum thapsus. Sometimes the specificity is a litany, as when he offers up this list “avocets, stilts, willets, killdeers, coots, phalaropes, rails, tule wrens, yellowheaded black birds, black terns . . . “
The title poem, meanwhile, moves back and forth between the scientific language, reportage style, and a more intimate one as we follow in one thread the carcass of a whale dropping ever so slowly through the depth zones of an ocean. It opens in the former: “One dies. /Eschrichtius robustus, gray/of the sole living genus, of baleen, of the family Eschrichtiidae.” Later, the reportage arrives: “July, 29, 2013: a sperm whale found deceased on the beach of a small island off the coast of the Netherlands . . . “And then the intimate, personal description of the speaker’s illness: “Weeks I couldn’t sleep. Years I couldn’t waken . . . it’s coming back one more . . . the viral fire, the toxic sea.” With that last word acting as a bridge to the other moments, one which circles back in another section the whalefall that follows the corpse through “the hypotoxic haze.” The poem is a masterclass in movement.
Some readers might be frustrated by the vocabulary, others might glide throughout without concern over knowing “exactly” what is meant (though most times Baker offers contextual clues or out and out explanations), and still others will look them up — Baker allows for all the options.
Nor does he shy away from simpler lines, simple at least in syntax and vocabulary and form, though they carry a larger weight. Lines that linger with the readers like “What you call a thing is seldom what it is.” Or ones that will call up a reader’s own memories, regrets: “I wish I had spoken when it matters, but who can know each time when to call or keep still?”
It's lines like these, along with the vivid precision of observational moments, and the musicality that one can drift along with though in perhaps-ignorance of meaning that always has me tell people who “don’t like poetry” to just read to find what strikes them rather than worrying about what so many recall from school — trying to “puzzle” out the “exact meaning.” Regular poetry readers will admire and respond to Baker’s level of craft and construction here, but casual or non-poetry readers should not be intimidated by the genre name and instead dive on in. Baker offers up more than enough to reward both types of readers.
May 16, 2025
David Baker’s Whale Fall is weird and beautiful in the best way. It takes this image of a whale sinking after death—feeding an entire ecosystem—and turns it into a metaphor for grief, illness, and the way life keeps going. The poems are tender, sometimes clinical, sometimes dreamy, always full of wonder. It’s about death, but it never feels dead.
June 22, 2023
I tried but the majority of these poems just didn't make any sense to me. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I did really like the one about the turtle.
January 13, 2023
David Baker has been writing some of the most interesting environmentally inspired poetry for several books now. He does his homework in the ecological sciences, and then finds metaphors there for the things in his own life, the kind of subjects that usually inform lyric poems.
But this one brings a lot of that together in new and interesting ways. The long title poem -- a very tightly controlled sequence, really -- follows the body of a dead whale as it sinks miles down through an ocean we polluted but that still has a way of cleansing things. Along the way Baker associates without strain aspects of a chronic illness (is it Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? I think so), family drama, other moments of natural history (Baker appears to be understandably fascinated with hummingbirds), even a hint of politics, with the descent and disintegration of that whale.
Of course he is able to do all of this because he has learned the intricacies of making poems. His sentences are complex, musical, and have lots of variation. He tries a number of different forms in these poems, allowing the form to respond to the demands of his subject.
And I find a wonderful quality of the quotable aphorism in Baker's work (I'm not sure everyone would find that wonderful or even recognize it where I do, but that's OK). For instance, here's a line an a half from a poem called "A Portrait of My Father in Seven Maps," a poem that, yes, deals with the family dynamics you can imagine from the title, but also centers around the poet's own aging. Anyway here's the line:
Any tree could
be the axis mundi around which the universe turns.
I find that wonderfully evocative. It is a statement about perspective, of course, but I look out my study window right now at big oaks, small cedars, a couple of birches, and I see them all as the center of the world. A different world.
But this one brings a lot of that together in new and interesting ways. The long title poem -- a very tightly controlled sequence, really -- follows the body of a dead whale as it sinks miles down through an ocean we polluted but that still has a way of cleansing things. Along the way Baker associates without strain aspects of a chronic illness (is it Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? I think so), family drama, other moments of natural history (Baker appears to be understandably fascinated with hummingbirds), even a hint of politics, with the descent and disintegration of that whale.
Of course he is able to do all of this because he has learned the intricacies of making poems. His sentences are complex, musical, and have lots of variation. He tries a number of different forms in these poems, allowing the form to respond to the demands of his subject.
And I find a wonderful quality of the quotable aphorism in Baker's work (I'm not sure everyone would find that wonderful or even recognize it where I do, but that's OK). For instance, here's a line an a half from a poem called "A Portrait of My Father in Seven Maps," a poem that, yes, deals with the family dynamics you can imagine from the title, but also centers around the poet's own aging. Anyway here's the line:
Any tree could
be the axis mundi around which the universe turns.
I find that wonderfully evocative. It is a statement about perspective, of course, but I look out my study window right now at big oaks, small cedars, a couple of birches, and I see them all as the center of the world. A different world.
July 10, 2025
Whalefall is an immersive exploration of ecological collapse and human fragility, blending poetic precision with scientific urgency. Its lyrical intensity and emotional depth make it a rewarding read.
May 28, 2024
My favorite poem of the collection is certainly Whale Fall, as I believe its imagery and rhythm is most powerful.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews