Transit

Baker’s graceful latest (after Whale Fall) announces that “the world is in pieces,” but nevertheless eschews despair. In these poems, “the heart lies open to the world,” where past and present meet until “years don’t matter.” There’s a yearning, keening quality to Baker’s writing, an attempt to get across “the flavor of some happiness, when we were happy,” and a sense of dawning understanding. “I would like to leave a good accounting of my life,” he writes, “And leave, when I leave, by a quiet path.” The well-trodden paths of memory announce themselves throughout the volume, asking readers to slow their own stride and take in the scenery—birds, landscapes, and fauna—populating Baker’s work: “You would miss it if you were hurrying.” In a seemingly quiet voice that resounds through the well-crafted musicality of his lines, Baker offsets the drift toward melancholy with an urge to celebrate beauty and what endures of it: “I think we live in many times at once,” he notes in a poem that channels and communes with Anne Bradstreet. Self-aware and bruised but celebratory, this astonishes. (Jan.)