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 the exquisite, musical title poem, a deft hybrid of eco-poetic alarm and intimate narrative, Baker transports us to the deep sea as a single gray whale carcass falls, decays, and is reinhabited by a cosmos of teeming lives. Among the strands of ocean health, microplastics, and related calamities of human disregard, the poet weaves in a personal story of chronic illness. The result is a stirring, confident work, astonishing in its emotional acuity and lyric range.
Each poem in Whale Fall is an echolocation, emitting its music to situate itself among others in the vastness of the world. Amidst climate change and catastrophe, as amidst a blooming viburnum or a viral disease, these poems send their songs across empty spaces of a line, a page, or a continent, to see who is out there, moving in the depths of being.
Industry Reviews
Whale Fall fixates not just on death, but on the descent into death, from life into what it becomes--death as metamorphosis. 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.... [A] gorgeous, mesmerizing eleventh collection.--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 "Arts Fuse"
[Whale Fall] finds [David Baker] in a wistful, elegiac mood, paying witness to the shared frailties of the natural world and the aging, ailing speaker. 'Listen, the years are short. They are nothing, ' one lovely and haunting poem exhorts. 'When we wake it is piecemeal, until we are gone.'-- "New York Times Book Review"
In poems as formally astute as they are emotionally resonant...Whale Fall casts an amber eye's deep nostalgic light on a world we're losing.... [H]opelessness in these poems is also riddled by hope, and a rigorous honesty of our earthly plight is countered by an equally rigorous generosity.--Dan Beachy-Quick "Colorado 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"
