Whale Fall

Whale Fall is David Baker's eleventh poetry collection. Baker is known as a poet of the American Midwest, and here he widens both his subject matter and his formal range. The poems are concerned with time, which they measure in a hummingbird's wingbeats and in geological epochs. They are equally concerned with place, from an Ohio backyard to the slopes of a melting glacier.

The title poem is a musical hybrid of ecological warning and personal narrative. It follows a single gray whale carcass as it sinks to the deep sea, decays, and becomes home to a crowd of new life. Around that image Baker gathers ocean health, microplastics and other consequences of human carelessness. He also weaves in an account of his own chronic illness.

The book treats each poem as a kind of sonar, sending out its music to find its position among the others. Against climate change and catastrophe, and alongside a blooming viburnum or a viral disease, the poems call across the gaps between lines, pages and continents to learn who else is out there.