Transit: Poems

by David Baker

Overview

A beloved nature poet reflects on environmental change, political transformation, and the ineluctable fact of aging.

We are—human and nonhuman—all on the move. In keenly observed verse, David Baker carries us across physical and emotional geographies, moving seamlessly from deep woods, city streets, bay shores, and creek beds to the contours of his own psyche and the larger cultural circumstances that mark off our lives.

But these dynamic poems are grounded in a deep sense of home, posing poignant questions about where we live, what we seek, and how we find our way through the world. Both an imaginative point of departure and a love letter to familiar places, the poems in Transit pay studied attention to the topographies of the world around us and the terrain of the heart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324117476
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/13/2026
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

David Baker is a poet, critic, and educator. He has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and more. Baker lives in Granville, Ohio, where he is emeritus professor of English at Denison University.

Read an Excerpt

from “Twilight Sleep”

So we lean together, over the ancient waters. Big sky
like music. All the night, freckled with doves with stars—
Listening to songs to be sung on the other side. Of what?
We will stay a while, by the water, until we are water.

Editorial Reviews

"David Baker’s 12th collection, Transit, achieves something inconspicuously extraordinary . . . Baker brings many practices of transit into his work: self-reflection, reading, walking and meditation, imaginative and scientific interaction with the natural world, and the directed openness necessary for composing poetry. In the resulting work, apparent opposites of process and perspective meet on these pages and transform in dialogue. As you might expect, this collection contains much more of the unexpected than you might expect.""— Michael Collins On The Sewall

"In a seemingly quiet voice that resounds through the well-crafted musicality of his lines, Baker offsets the drift toward melancholy with an urge to celebrate beauty and what endures of it . . . Self-aware and bruised but celebratory, this astonishes."— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"What a stunning book, one of the finest, most complexly and intricately woven collections I’ve read in many years. David Baker’s formal architectures and exquisite variations frame in Transit his luminous reflections on our present moment, one increasingly encroached upon by mortality, while allowing a capacious tensegrity and sense of inevitable expansiveness to embody the meditations of these meticulously calibrated reckonings. In their ease and focused precision, Baker’s observations of the natural world become urgent field notes of hope, an almanac of daily losses, delicate pensées, and indelible inscriptions upon the air of our passage. Always, as the walker (and witness) in our world of artificial human transport and transit, the lines of these remarkable poems insist that Eden, indeed, once had a human scale."— David St. John, author of Prayer for My Daughter

From the Publisher