Transit: Poems
by David Baker
(W.W. Norton, 2026)
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
The nature of Nature is a riddle as difficult to solve as any humanity knows. Its answer is precisely as intractable as whatever follows “Why is there something rather than nothing?” since nature is the something that is there. I would argue, in fact, that the riddle answers the question: the nature of Nature is why there is something rather than nothing (but not vice versa).
The first words on the flyleaf of Transit are “A beloved nature poet reflects on environmental change.” With loving respect for the people who write book jacket copy, the blandness of that sentence chills me. Dan Chiasson begins a review of David Baker’s earlier book Swift: New and Selected Poems (2020) in The New Yorker with the assertion “David Baker is a poet of American anti-pastoral,” an arguable assertion he makes no more attempt to define or prove than the parallel thesis sentence of the review’s second paragraph: “Baker is a professor of English at Denison University and the longtime poetry editor of The Kenyon Review.”
In a New York Times review of the same book, Eric McHenry, more interestingly, says “Baker is a poet of the natural world who would probably reject that label because what other world is there?” If that, too, is an intentionally arguable assertion, it is less risible than Chaisson’s opening because it has a rhetorical spin that locates it just far enough beyond the boundary of tautology to make it seem that McHenry is questioning the unquestionable. Like Chiasson, he gets away with making an assertion that the poet himself might reject—but at least he says so.
In fairness, one really cannot discuss the poetry—especially but not only the recent poetry—of David Baker without attempting to describe and to account for his relentless focus on the natural world. I point out these matters not to criticize or undermine what these other reviewers have said of Baker’s poetry—both the reviews I have mentioned are excellent, intelligent, and valuable—but to foreshadow my own inevitable failure to elucidate what Baker writes about.
Nature is nature, a formalist critic might say (especially in a book review); if a poem produces a bird or a flower, it’s nature poetry—just get on with it and read the poem closely. A critic invested in ecopoetics would have a different view, as would someone founding their approach on the tradition of the pastoral, or the anti-pastoral, or Romanticism, or the history of the sublime. The word “nature” tends to put the critical mind to sleep, or rouse it into a frenzy—or both. But taken on their own terms, Baker’s poems are incisive with a vision driven by love, shaped by music, and torqued by anxiety. Nature is in all those things, but so is the ink on the page.
*
Transit begins with a wren. Not just a wren: a “little wren.” Obviously a nature poem! And perhaps a sentimental one. One facet of nature poetry as a category is that some of it lives in the greeting card shop—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But attentive readers encountering this poem, “Six Notes,” will likely ask themselves what the poet will do to counteract preciosity. And of course the poem has already delivered an answer.
Come down to us. Come down with your song,
little wren. The world is in pieces.
“Six Notes,” then, does not simply begin with a wren. It also begins with music, as the title alerts us and the first line confirms. At the same time it begins with a gesture of invocation, and with a judgment about the world. The poem continues “The world is in pieces. / / We must not say so”— just as we also must not begin a poem with a “little wren,” familiar critical voices in the back of our mind may be insisting.
“We must not say so” is doing heavy rhetorical work here; its commentary cuts multiple ways. Is it an admonition against the expression of despair? If we find the world in pieces, are we not to speak of it? Why not? Perhaps because, as Wittgenstein reminds us, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” But readers will likely also recognize who this sentence most directly evokes:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14” is a very far cry from “Six Notes.” Or is it? Berryman’s world, surely, was in pieces. His speaker responds to that situation with boredom (as he insists, perhaps too much) while invoking many natural things: the sky, the “great sea,” mountains, the sky and sea again, and a dog, which
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
We have to admit, there’s quite a lot of nature in Berryman’s poem, but I can’t remember ever hearing or reading anyone refer to him as a nature poet. Ecopoetics, I suspect—the very word, not to mention what lies behind it—would have revolted him. One may argue that he would have been better off with more nature in his life and less gin (which takes its place in this poem, interestingly, alongside “the tranquil hills,” as if gin were as natural as they are—which, viewed in a certain way, it is).
None of that changes the fact that the hinge connecting Berryman’s poem with Baker’s is what we must not say, and that it gets said, in both poems, anyway.
“The world is in pieces.” For my money, that sentence describes the method not only of “Six Notes” but the whole of Transit more accurately, more urgently, than the label “nature poetry.” Baker’s work, like Berryman’s, is saturated with lacrimae rerum, Virgil’s phrase from the Aeneid: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (there are tears of things, and mortal things touch the mind). The broken world of mortal things evokes boredom in Berryman’s speaker and a desperate invocation in Baker’s; I submit that these reactions are two sides of a coin. We must not fail to say so.
*
The invocation of music in “Six Notes,” along with a wren who might produce it, is a gesture firmly fixed in the DNA of Baker’s poetry. So is the wisdom to balance it with something utterly different: a few lines farther on, memento mori and a silent scream.
The deer come to die beside the creek.
Mud the color of walnut stain. Reek and
runoff from the new development, there,
beyond the woods. Rib and skull. No jawbone—
. . .
It makes a soundless scream.
Obviously this poem, in six quatrains each of which constitutes a note, was carefully chosen as Transit’s opener, and its increasing complexity, accomplished by juxtaposed images and also allusions further juxtaposed, is typical of what Baker does.
Transit, like most of Baker’s books, risks a close and delicate but verging-on-the-futile concern with beauty, which indeed his poems do find most often in the natural world. But it has to be first discovered and then—crucially—insisted on.
Dunk two leaves in the creek,
where it runs down cold, and you get emeralds
in your palm. I mean it.
“I mean it,” like “We must not say so,” is making a rhetorical gesture that is almost unforgivably obvious. Almost, but not quite, because it is in the service of a metaphor—one that pays homage to nature, but like all metaphors is not literally true. “I mean it” insists, desperately, on its truth.
Part of the concern of Transit is that we are being borne over a transition that we hope will not be the final one, in which neither beauty nor metaphor can be trusted. The poem just quoted, “Jewelweed,” does a dance between uncertainty and insistence—hoping, perhaps, to gather and hold the pieces of the world to be, if not actually mended, at least held tenderly in one place. But there are unbridgeable gaps between what we know, what we desire, and what is really there:
Looks like the inner ear bones of a wolf.
Like you’ve seen those. Well, pictures. It’s close—
The problem, strictly speaking, is metaphysical but fundamentally skewed by consciousness and its discontents. There is something, not nothing? Does that make you happy? For God’s sake, don’t even ask. I mean it.
“We must not say so” is echoed in the title of a later poem in the collection, “Can You Say It?” Here, the terrible doubt about meaning in a fractured world is foregrounded:
What I meant to say is the morning was heavy.
…………Was it our sorrow. The tree was at the window.
…………Before we could see the webs, the dew, the thousand
…………little apples, we saw the end of it only. The night, yes—
…………the end of it. There is always something else to say.
…………No, I mean the first light. There’s far too much to say.
“What I meant to say,” “always something else to say,” “far too much to say”: these are all very different propositions, logically, but they are also the same proposition. What I meant to say is: I mean it. Keep saying that until it becomes far too much, a tense circle of words made in the image of a Möbius strip of anxiety. Nature, of course, is implicated, but to say that is to say very nearly nothing.
Note, too, that question posed as a statement: “Was it our sorrow.” Period, not question mark. Baker makes this move relatively often, as if to suggest that some questions are not questions at all: they are declarations. Much of the language in these poems strains at the edge of meaning while looking perfectly ordinary. As Baudelaire put it in “Correspondences,” “Nature is a temple whose living pillars / Sometimes allow confused words to emerge; / Man passes there through forests of symbols / Which observe him with familiar looks.”
*
In these poems there are very many birds. If we keep naming them, can we keep from killing them? It’s an open question. One of Baker’s patron saints, surely, is James Wright, who wrote, in a poem called “Redwings,” “It turns out you can kill them. / It turns out you can make the world perfectly clean.” Baker has taken that oracular utterance to heart, and reinvented it in another key.
I held a bird
in my hand. No.
It was a game—
a child’s game. No,
my bird friend said
when he unstrung
the mist net where
one bird hung mid-
flight, between scrub
and sumac, by
the slender path.
Like this. He placed
it so.
Our care for our fellow creatures can be so tender, so gentle, that it might scare them to death. Think of Audubon, killing birds and subjecting them to the art of taxidermy so that he might then submit his stuffed birds to the indignities of paint. Technique is important, but only up to a point: how much does it matter to a reader that this poem is written in syllabic lines? That technical point is an artifact of the poem’s composition which is not vital to the reader’s understanding. These poems are all technically careful, in the best sense. Syllabic versification in English is inaudible, like a hawk’s flight. The prey never knows it’s coming.
We humans, of course, are part of nature whether we want to be or not; we have spent the lives of many animals protesting what we are and who’s in charge, but have changed our human nature so little it’s enough to make stones weep. We are one with nature; we must not say so. So:
Stubborn. That’s one thing.
The little brown bat,
…………whom scholars call Myotis lucifugus,
will not be moved to
leave its habitat,
…………so is dying now in drastic numbers.
The wren is little. The bat is little. The bird is music. The bat is obdurate. Humans can describe them. Up to a point.
*
As soon as we decide there is something rather than nothing, doubts arise. Speaking of a couple walking on what is probably a Manhattan sidewalk, “Says the Wind” declares
Their shoulders are pitched forward hard to cut
through the city headwind. But there is no wind—
Then, in the next brief section (another note), we are told
What we see of a wind is what we see
of the world of things. Not wind but a chaff
of pollen choking in that whirl.
A wind that is not a wind but whose effects we see nonetheless? Nature is atoms, quarks, and neutrinos, whirling through the cosmos. Yes, we know. But do we really?
And how is that “nature poetry”?
*
There is a quiet tragedy in such a line of thought. The world is what we see of a wind that is not there. Wittgenstein would have us not speak of it, for we must not say so. Heidegger would gloss it with “The world worlds,” a sentence which I oscillate between thinking marvelously profound, or a worthless tautology.
The word transit is a very well-chosen title for this volume. A transit is a crossing, a journey; it moves. It is a sibling word to metaphor, the first from Latin, the second from Greek. They are not synonyms exactly; the Greeks are “carried over” while the Romans cross on their own legs, having more skin in the game. But still, something moves. Transit leads to transitory: pollen in the wind.
As a noun, a transit is a surveyor’s tool. The etymological transition (obviously another word that is part of the family) is via astronomy: a celestial body passes over something. Astronomers long ago invented a special telescope to observe and measure this motion: a transit instrument. A surveyor uses a transit, adapted from the astronomer’s tool, to do several things—notably to observe when a point moves across sightlines. These tools seek to measure concrete entities—entities that are pollen in the wind. Baker’s poems are such tools.
“Before the falling, the falling,” a poem late in the book tells us: “The Other Sorrow,” a poem poised so precariously between worlds that its language dissolves:
Before the many things not said here among the never-to-be—
Fallen—each shifting—each not-fallen not-said thing not said— Before my frail my basket what the future has already forgotten—
That dash is the end of a section, and the poem resumes in another key: “Why so sad?” There is a lovely description then of tiny crabapples falling: “Shaking— / And dripping each the size of a wren’s heart.” We’ve already met that wren, and we know it is small; how much smaller, then, must its heart be? “Sorrow is unsafe when it’s real sorrow,” the poem then tells us, and it is the sorrow of the transitory, the pain of the transit. “Hear them— / Singing? They are gone. You can still hear them singing—” The poem ends in a syntactic vacuum, with that dash.
*
And the book ends in the same place, with a dash: “Soon we’ll be ten miles down the road, / then farther, toward the sea—”
David Baker’s journey as a poet has been long, and has passed through many stations. Now in his early 70s, he has honed his art on the grinding stone of his heart until it has grown almost transparent, to a perfectly crafted thinness, suggesting that you can sharpen your sword until it becomes a window. These poems touch the world lovingly, and yet tentatively, knowing how fragile everything is. Don’t break it, the poems are telling themselves. And us.
That, I judge, is Baker’s finding as a “nature poet,” which allows the definition of that old phrase to swerve over into the contemporary ecopoetics: we are breaking it; we must say so.
If the world is pollen in the wind, it is atomistic, made of such tiny, delicate particles that they can barely be seen, and so everything can barely be seen. And it is all moving, going somewhere; we don’t know where, but we too of necessity are moving, being carried sometimes, going on our own legs sometimes, but going: “I let my eyes go blur. White wings, white clouds. / And now we’re moving, along the creek bed—”
Everything ends with a dash, a rush across existence into something else. Baker captures this motion—it is made of the tiniest, most fragile things, like the heart of a little bird or the inner ear bones of a wolf—perfectly in the net of his craft.
And then he lets it go.