Never-Ending Birds: Poems

By David Baker

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393339696
• ISBN13: 9780393339697
• Release Date: April 2011
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Buy This Book

This is David Baker's best book of poems yet, and that's saying a lot. it's lean and yet rich; it's accurate and clear and yet deeply mysterious; it's beautiful and dignified and yet full of breakage, slippage, and pain: at once dignified and (in the best sense, if there is a best sense) abject. Abject in the strict sense: something cast off: The Book of Molting he might have titled it. And it has a lot of birds in it. There are so many excellences here that it seems almost churlish to single anything out, but if I had to pick one poem from the book as my favorite, it would be "Tis a Fayling." There's a poem to marvel at. It does something unprecedented, which is to make all the voices in the poem--which are disparate--into one voice, while at the same time allowing each its proper scope and scale, the historic voices finally becoming the narrator's voice in the present. The psychological/dramatic/lyric achievement here is stunning.

Joy, grief and savoir faire

David Baker's remarkable new book of poems is a quietly lyrical, heart-felt journey through divorce--and out again, into a world of joy and mystery. Part autobiography, part chronicle, the collection is cunningly written in apparent free-verse lines that are anything but "free." The sly blank verse "is remarkable"--as James Reiss comments in his October 1 review: "ars est celere artem."

Amazing.

This book is expansive & polished, the topics covered are wonderful & handled in a delicate manner. There is hate & love & nature, all weaved together in a cohesive bunch. This is my first book of David Baker's that I've owned, & I don't have a single regret. This makes me want to strive to write more elegant & expansive myself.