He’s tasted the fruit, and in his terror, pain, and regret, he winces and recoils at his inadequacy, especially at the inadequacy of his calling: language.įace-to-face with the unthinkable ruin of the patriarch, with the failure of his father’s life and body, the speaker can’t help but feel that he, too, has failed. Channeling his father’s chiding humor (“Careful, kiddo”) and Calvinism (“the house of election”), the speaker’s eyes are fully opened.

In garish HD he sees all the flaws of the “brutal” world (“The Old Nerve”), the sham and shame of its ceremonies and works, all the gaping pores and blackheads, starting with his own. What once gave pleasure and will give pleasure again.Ĭut off, “severed,” “amputated,” he’s “wrenched” (one of his favorite words) out to the limit of his life’s gravitational field, a kind of “last west” (“Late Pastoral”) redolent of what Elisa New calls “the old American preoccupation with the end.” Here, he makes grief’s orbit, detached in a self-protective cocoon, withdrawn in idealism, like Milton’s Satan licking his wounds, looking for a way back in. How abstract, this winged circling around Smaller, then smaller still to become full-featured The turkey buzzards arrive and things get Grief’s particle accelerator has expelled him from himself, from his life and its materials, which he sees through new eyes. Uprooted, unhoused, these poems report from the threshold between the living and the dead, the self and the other, the word and the world. Having ministered to his dying clergyman father, the speaker of these poems is sent reeling. I’m happy to have a little more to say now, and to report that Posthumous Noon, Baker’s second collection, meets, even exceeds, my very high expectations.Īn endemic fireweed of insight runs riot in these posthumously disturbed homescapes. But their foreclosed Auerbachian darkness and inexorable momentum left their mark on me. Baker pulled off something in those muscular, bewildered, visionary elegies that I was barely ready for. I’ve been waiting for this book since The Missouri Review published a batch of the poems while I was poetry editor there, round about 2012.

Homescapes austin bend over