Member Reviews
Bill C, Reviewer
As always, and I seriously cannot believe this has not been fixed yet, I have to preface a poetry review by noting that the Kindle does not keep the formatting of the poet. If I read a poem on my Paperwhite, lines end on one word; on my IPad vertically on another, and on my IPad if I read horizontally. It’s incredibly frustrating and that’s as a reader. As a writer I’d be infuriated. C’mon Amazon; it’s way past the time to fix this.
Anyway, obviously I won’t be talking much about structure, line breaks (the ones I quote may or may not be correctly shown), enjambment, etc. Because who knows?
David Baker’s Whalefall runs the gamut in terms of length for its poems, some running a handful of lines while the title piece runs well over a dozen pages. If the pieces vary in length, they’re more cohesive in terms of subject, with nature coming under the focus of a sharply focused eye and activist mind. Other subjects include time and illness.
Baker’s sound sense is evident right at the start, as in “The Telling”, with the assonance of “the old ice that stones can hold the one note of”, that “O” sound continuing throughout the poem’s brief length. Or in the opening of “Mullein”, which makes use of both assonance and consonance: “A single stalk/by the side of the creek/I put my hand in/Cold water the color of clouds.” There’s a musicality that runs throughout the work that even casual poetry readers (I put myself in that category) will respond to even if they have some difficulty with the fragmentary nature of some the poems, the back and forth between scenes/subject in some, or the precise language, which can drop into the arcane and/or scientific, as again in “Mullein” when Baker names Verbascum thapsus. Sometimes the specificity is a litany, as when he offers up this list “avocets, stilts, willets, killdeers, coots, phalaropes, rails, tule wrens, yellowheaded black birds, black terns . . . “
The title poem, meanwhile, moves back and forth between the scientific language, reportage style, and a more intimate one as we follow in one thread the carcass of a whale dropping ever so slowly through the depth zones of an ocean. It opens in the former: “One dies. /Eschrichtius robustus, gray/of the sole living genus, of baleen, of the family Eschrichtiidae.” Later, the reportage arrives: “July, 29, 2013: a sperm whale found deceased on the beach of a small island off the coast of the Netherlands . . . “And then the intimate, personal description of the speaker’s illness: “Weeks I couldn’t sleep. Years I couldn’t waken . . . it’s coming back one more . . . the viral fire, the toxic sea.” With that last word acting as a bridge to the other moments, one which circles back in another section the whalefall that follows the corpse through “the hypotoxic haze.” The poem is a masterclass in movement.
Some readers might be frustrated by the vocabulary, others might glide throughout without concern over knowing “exactly” what is meant (though most times Baker offers contextual clues or out and out explanations), and still others will look them up — Baker allows for all the options.
Nor does he shy away from simpler lines, simple at least in syntax and vocabulary and form, though they carry a larger weight. Lines that linger with the readers like “What you call a thing is seldom what it is.” Or ones that will call up a reader’s own memories, regrets: “I wish I had spoken when it matters, but who can know each time when to call or keep still?”
It's lines like these, along with the vivid precision of observational moments, and the musicality that one can drift along with though in perhaps-ignorance of meaning that always has me tell people who “don’t like poetry” to just read to find what strikes them rather than worrying about what so many recall from school — trying to “puzzle” out the “exact meaning.” Regular poetry readers will admire and respond to Baker’s level of craft and construction here, but casual or non-poetry readers should not be intimidated by the genre name and instead dive on in. Baker offers up more than enough to reward both types of readers.
