Overview

We are all human and nonhuman on the move. The poems in Transit emerge from just such a walk through the world. In keenly observed verse, David Baker carries us across physical and emotional geographies, moving seamlessly from deep woods, city streets, and creek beds to the contours of his psyche and the larger cultural circumstances that mark off our lives. Several of the poems operate as field notes, drawn from Baker’s work assessing bird migrations, streamflow, and geological movements alongside environmental scientists. Because of his ecological orientation, Baker’s work is also grounded in a deep sense of home, which is captured in the double meaning of the collection’s title. Each piece in the collection acts like the eyepiece of a surveyor’s transit—a finely tuned short-range telescope, intricately balanced and calibrated to survey the surrounding geography. Through this lens, Baker pays studied attention to the topographies of the world around us and the terrain of the heart. Both an imaginative point of departure and a love letter to familiar places, Transit poses poignant questions about what we seek as we find our way through the world.

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9781324117476

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Reviews

""What a stunning book, one of the finest, most complexly and intricately woven collections I’ve read in many years. David Baker’s formal architectures and exquisite variations frame in Transit his luminous reflections on our present moment, one increasingly encroached upon by mortality, while allowing a capacious tensegrity and sense of inevitable expansiveness to embody the meditations of these meticulously calibrated reckonings. In their ease and focused precision, Baker’s observations of the natural world become urgent field notes of hope, an almanac of daily losses, delicate pensées, and indelible inscriptions upon the air of our passage. Always, as the walker (and witness) in our world of artificial human transport and transit, the lines of these remarkable poems insist that Eden, indeed, once had a human scale."" -- David St. John, author of Prayer for My Daughter

Author Information

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.

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