“Why not, David Baker asks, express ideas in such a way that we perceive them as sensations? That we comprehend them not as argument or discourse or information but as lived experience—“thought through my eyes,” as Joyce described it—closing the gap in that binary divide.”
“This is poetry of a very high order, yet its pathos is uncompromised by ostentation, didacticism, or self-consciousness. It is “less the way we know,” he reminds himself, “than by the trees, / by the death of the trees, by the millions.””
“Scavenger Loop is Baker’s eleventh and most accomplished book of poems, and it follows from a career that spans thirty-five years and includes five prose books of criticism, commentary, interviews, and reviews. He has spent a lifetime immersed in poetry’s constituent elements, the scholarly history that has monitored it, and the mysterious workings of its aesthetic appeal. What sets Scavenger Loop apart from so much poetry being written today is how it manages to blend those varying perspectives through a faceted overlay of languages: sound bites, glyphs, tags and bywords, the banalities of politicians, the denatured nomenclature of medical care, the coercive formulations of commerce—the incessant babble that fills the ear of the modern world.”
“In the poems that precede and follow this sequence Baker appeases his need to work up a poetics, inflected by his own temperament, that is true to what I will call the “organic” Midwestern experience. By nature a nature poet, he writes poems that are often singled out as praise songs to the landscape in which he lives. But he also takes on the more daunting task of opening the doors to an ever-enlarging “inorganic” threat to that landscape, a threat embodied in sinister encodings like “SmartStax RIB Complete,” “trait stacking,” “VT Triple PRO,” ciphers entwined in a carcinogenic loop of genetic modifications, herbicidal excess, cropland erosion, habitat destruction, chemical concentrates in our water supplies—all traceable links to (among other things) the spreading multinational takeover of Midwestern farmland.”
“In taking on such public subjects a poet is always at risk of currying ideological favor with the reader or, to borrow his trope, recycling ideas ratified by consensus. To fend off those possibilities, Baker turns his poem against itself, short-circuiting his natural impulse toward fluency and elaboration. “The world gives you itself in fragments / in splinters,” and the poet returns it in kind. If anxiety had an idiom and syntax of its own, I suspect it would sound like this.”
“The “Scavenger Loop” sequence is a landmark in Midwestern poetry, reenacting a struggle, an epic struggle, that will redefine that region in the years to come. But this is not simply a regional struggle. It is a global struggle played out on a regional stage. And the question it asks—“what have we done”—is echoed in the warning it issues: “Something is coming more than we know how.””