Swift

Starred review from April 1, 2019
Poems about birds amount to a genre. Two masterpiece anthologies, The Bird/Poem Book (1970) and The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry (1980), attest to the fact, and some poets' self-selections of their own work?to wit, Baker's?glorify it. There are also plenty of deer, butterflies, bees, frogs, and horses in Baker's poems, along with trees and flowers. But he is not any kind of biologist, and parents failing and dying, a young daughter with a hyperactivity disorder, a remembered embrace, near-crashes on the highway (one with another car, another with a bird), and other significant human events also figure in them. Much hunting, foraging, and scavenging goes on; much maintenance of land and waters, too. Baker's would be a poetry of a place except that the place is general, perhaps anywhere from Maine to the Midwest and out to Oregon that is on the edge of the rural. This place is a space for the entire life cycle of nonhumans and for the anxieties of observant humans. (Just what is happening to the bees?) Perhaps any North American will recognize it, even intimately. With each poem delicately and sturdily crafted, this collection creates one of the great spaces in American poetry.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)