David Baker

David Baker is a poet, critic, editor, and educator. He was born in Maine, grew up in Missouri, and currently lives in Granville, Ohio, and Hudson, New York. He is the author of many books of poetry, recently Whale Fall (W. W. Norton, 2022), Swift: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2019), as well as the forthcoming volume, Walk to the Water (Norton). His books of prose about poetry include Show Me Your Environment: On Poetry, Poets, and Poems (Univ. of Michigan, 2014) and Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf, 2007). An edited volume, Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly, is forthcoming later this year from W. W. Norton.

Profiling Baker in The New Yorker, the critic Dan Chiasson wrote that “[David Baker’s] work evinces the moral courage of keeping still in the landscape: in our era of climate change, poetry’s mandate to measure the rhythms of the year has become a valuable form of witness.… He is heir to such writers as Henry David Thoreau… and Robert Frost. To read Baker’s poems … is to appreciate the full range of their formal resources, their attunement to cycles and processes rather than to mere outcomes and effects.” For the Huffington Post, Carol Muske-Dukes asserted that “It’s as if Baker can’t write an off-key phrase, even in the midst of impassioned indictment.… [His] is a towering poetic consciousness, akin to Nature itself.”