Whale Fall by David Baker

Whale Fall by David Baker

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 its exquisite, musical title poem, a deft hybrid of eco-poetic alarm and intimate narrative of illness, Baker transports us to the deep sea as a single whale carcass falls, decays, and is reinhabited by a cosmos of teeming lives. Amidst climate change, catastrophe, and viral disease, each of these poems is an echolocation, emitting its song to the vastness of the world.

"The craft of Whale Fall defiesIt asserts, for me, a definition of poetry: an unbearable gulf of feeling made indelible by form." -- Diane Seuss - Paris Review
"[Baker] locates his experiences in an understanding of the natural world that is both scientific and transcendent." -- Ron Charles - Washington Post Book Club
"Baker’s 12th volume of poetry finds him in a wistful, elegiac mood, paying witness to the shared frailties of the natural world and the aging, ailing speaker." -- New York Times Book Review
"One of the collection’s many achievements, however, is that [its] density of reference never lands heavily. Whale Fall contains voices that fragment and shift pace, but never loses sight of a lyricism so reliable that it feels instinctual... In 2001, [Baker] wrote of 'the moral harmony of nature.' Whale Fall might be the collection that refines and refinds that harmony for the Anthropocene, in which acid rain and microplastics and handholding in a tree are all part of the same music." -- Daniel Shailer - Los Angeles Review of Books
"From the shadow of the garfish to the memory of seabed in Ohio sandstone, nothing appears to be too slight or too immense for David Baker’s powers of lyric transformation. In book after eloquent book, his artistry has become more purely his own: pared down to essentials while refining its scope of generous inclusion. Baker’s method, like his subject, is the fine pulse of human encounter: here in its most distillate manifestation." -- Linda Gregerson
"As a book of ecopoetry, it could quickly slide into the merely catastrophic—because, these days, what else could it be?—but somehow, even as it elegizes, Baker’s Whale Fall also cultivates our attention to the marvelous... [G]orgeous [and] mesmerizing." -- Chelsea Wagenaar - Plume
"Whale Fall is divided into five numerated sections, notable for their variance, expansiveness, and sumptuous orchestration. I read this book as one absorbs a symphony, attending the lavish feast of sound and motion with its multiple instruments and silences. The poet knows his orchestra, and he brings every technique to bear on this composition." -- Alina Stefanescu - The Arts Fuse
"A virtuoso of eco-poetry and acoustics, Baker meditates on the nonpareil majesty of the planet with rigorous consideration and reverence... Baker’s careful, captivating writing sinks under the skin, summoning a long-forgotten need for stillness, wonder, and attention to the sacrosanctity of the world." -- Publishers Weekly

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781324020639
ISBN 10	1324020636
Title	Whale Fall
Author	David Baker
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	WW Norton & Co
Year published	2022-07-19
Number of pages	112
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.