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“Find your way to Hungerford where my/father glowers over me.

Battered but never beaten, this narrator finds salvation in ecstatic communion with the gods of jazz and especially boxing: “O Tommy Hearns, O blood come down,” she prays. These, though, are different poems, their lens cracked and turned on a narrator seeking her own deliverance from abandonment and violence. Rarely has a first book of poems been more exalted than Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, which the Times Literary Supplement called “an excoriation of present-day America by a new and lethal commentator.” Now, in this extraordinary follow-up, Calvocoressi continues her mission to document the particular hardships of derelict American small towns. If the biding place of intimacy and love is broken - there is the consolation of the larger shapes that we make as an "us" - in poetry, in science, in translation and typology - and David Baker is eloquently at home in the protean shapes.Finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. All histories, even the personal, are taken up, finally, into natural history - the "digital whorls" of fingers pointing to heaven become the galaxies. The "never-ending birds" are a child's observation that becomes a traditional family "endearment." Though the family itself "ends" - the birds and the sky go on, never-ending. He draws on many sources - from Maurice Blanchot to Cabeza de Vaca to the jeremiads of the puritan Michael Wigglesworth - to re-examine the map of emotional history. The tension created by "Behind me, winter wind" is a bittersweet, seasoned reckoning. The poem, like others in the book, is tightly-controlled, but aching with loss. In Never-Ending Birds, he swerves close to despair - it is no accident that one of the first poems in the book is "Posthumous Man" which, of course, summons John Keats' famous assessment of his own dying, his leading of a "posthumous existence". David Baker's voice is steadier - he is a reliably illuminating presence in American poetry - a profound poet who inhabits the natural world and the realm of the arcane with equal ease.