Never-Ending Birds: Poems

by David Baker

“The most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright.”―Marilyn Hacker Part map, part travelogue, part chronicle, part autobiography, Never-Ending Birds explores a variety of landscapes from Midwestern villages to the boroughs of big cities. Steeped in story―divorce, loss, raising a child, uncovering old worlds and new loves―these poems are gracefully lived in, lived through, with mystery and beauty.

from “Never-Ending Birds”:
That’s us pointing to the clouds. Those are clouds
of birds, now we see, one whole cloud of birds.
There we are, pointing out the car windows.
October. Gray-blue-white olio of birds.
Never-ending birds, you called the first time―
years we say it, the three of us, any
two of us, one of those just endearments.
Apt clarities. Kiss on the lips of hope.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

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

[Viktoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems are beautiful, other feel artificial. The title poem is haunting and will stay with me always. It’s a family trauma, simple and yet complex, and altogether beautiful. I’m fascinated by “Before”, though still trying to tie the ends between Baker’s interpretation and my reaction to it.

I’ve been trying to understand some of the other heart wrenching poems from this collection, but I seem to be in a different place than Baker, and can’t quite place the pieces together.

There is a lot of natural world here, in a personal and also physical way. The poet’s relationship to nature is different from mine - I am fascinated how differently can one reflect his surroundings. I’d love to be able to talk to Baker, to get the feeling for where he is coming from, so I could better connect to much of his poetry.

[Shevaun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really adored this one. The balance of the known world: history, taxonomy, etymology, with the unknown: humanity as a whole, as well as the narrator's own personal emotional landscape. Baker grounds his poems in DeVaca, Birds, Rev. Wigglesworth, and otherwise known quantities then elevates them by raising concerns about his divorce, his worry that he is losing connections with the people in his life. The push and pull between known and unknown is very moving. Plus, as an animal lover, I just had to give it a five. Wonderful.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore this book. I adore it so much, in fact, that I've written a review of it which is forthcoming this fall in an issue of Third Coast. Do yourself a favor and give this one a whirl!

[Superstition Review · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never-Ending Birds is a book of many feats. While steeped in the rich and referential history such as DeVaca and Keats, there is another consistent underlying and human darkness to this book. A past love experience haunts the speaker in many of the poems. This tension is often introduced towards the ends of poems. Such as in “Bay,” a horse gets castrated and ends with …and that’s / when I thought of us, dancing / in the dining room. This happens again in “The Rumor,” And so—we hear—the lovers / do this, too. Which follows the event of a mountain lion hunting a deer. This underlying haunting is reminiscent of our own lives and how personal and emotional events are often difficult to escape. If successful art relates to the human experience, then David Baker accomplishes this task. Never-Ending Birds is a book rich in imagery and heavy in emotional weight.

Review by Bradly Brandt

[A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title poem is one of the saddest most beautiful poems I have ever read. We read this for our monthly Living Poets Society get together at the Boulder Book Store and when that poem was read out loud, it brought tears to my eyes. It's quoted beneath the description of the book. It's one of the few that gets at what seems to be the emotional driver of the book. His divorce and the fear that he is losing the connection with his daughter.

What I love about that work (it's emotional honesty, simplicity, language and evocation of nature) is present in fits and starts in the rest of the book. Too many of the poems veer off into obscure references and notes. Some of the poems are hard to even comprehend without checking the notes and then bam you come up against the title poem or Bay (about a horse being castrated)and the beauty and pure force knocks you over.

I wish Baker would speak in his own voice more often. Evoking long-dead figures seems more like a parlor trick for this poet than mining the rich emotional material that is at his disposal. That said many of the poems do illuminate themes and echo ideas that resonate throughout the book.

[Grace Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Baker is one of my favorite poets. I am reading everything he's ever written. There's an elegance in his wording and poetic statement that I find irresistible. His line-breaks are impeccable. There is an implicit vulnerability that is utterly human and universal in Baker's work. This book was one of my "walk-around with" books. These are the books that go into my purse and go everywhere I go for a couple of weeks. I pull them out while waiting in line at the bank, read a few lines, and...well,you get the picture. (That's the beauty of those little slivers of books of poetry. They never weigh you down.)

The title poem, "Never-Ending Birds" is sad and beautiful.

"I have another house. Now you have two.
That's us pointing with our delible whorls

into the faraway, the trueborn blue-
white unfeathering cloud of another year."

[Laura Munson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite poets. If you're shy to read poetry, try David Baker.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is in rare company.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has a good deal of the allusiveness that is in much of Baker's work, particularly early on. It has that syntactic richness, that some people find to be a bit showy. But he's taking everything he has learned there and is finding a less intrusive way to use those prosodic skills.

Plus this book is reaching out into the world, to the things of the world. Baker has been on that journey for a long time, but now he is doing it more compulsively. There is something in this book of divorce, a young child, a new love -- and perhaps that material is part of the explanation for the change. And "change" might be wrong -- it might be better to think of this as the latest stage of Baker's journey.

It's a wonderful book

[Stephen Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

To see each thing clear
is still not to see

a thing apart from
words or our wild need.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems in this collection that I like best are the ones that intertwine the speaker's voice with another voice, with quotes and descriptions from other writers: I like the layers of those poems, the interplay of voices and places and times, how now slips into then or vice versa. Like "Posthumous Man," (ignore the terrible formatting on that page!) which starts with the line, "I hate the world," the narrator saying it, which would perhaps be off-putting, too much angst (p 18). But then that line shows up again as a quotation from a letter by Keats, who is also (along with the narrator, I guess) the "posthumous man" of the title, and suddenly, I like the whole poem a lot more, how it moves from the narrator's disappointments to Keats's disappointments and back again, how it contains both the domestic and the wild, how satisfying its form is. Other poems I like for the same reasons: "Horse Madness", with bits of Virgil, "1st My Children," about Shaker gift drawings (oh man I am a sucker for poems about visual art), "Stranging," with bits of Cabeza de Vaca and bits of Edward Taylor (this might be my favorite poem in the whole book), and "One Willow", with bits of Paracelsus and others.

[Linda B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was pretty much what I expected after seeing Mr. Baker at Ohioanna Book Fair. His poetry does tell a story. It might make me like non-rhyming poetry.