The Truth about Small Towns: Poems
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Skilled at both extended narratives and intense, intimate lyrics, David Baker combines his talents in his fifth collection of poems. Working in syllabics, sonnets, couplets, and free verse, Baker can write unflinchingly about love, illness, madness, and perseverance.
His small towns are the burgs of the Midwest, where there is a constant tension between a future thatтАЩs coming and a past that may never vanish. The grocer on the corner now carries mango chutney, and the city council must decideтАФWendyтАЩs or wetlands.
From these rural towns, Baker evokes lovers, mothers and fathers, highway workmen, hospital patients, and the long dead. He spots the inner struggles of everyday living, as in these lines from тАЬThe WomenтАЭ: тАЬthere comes a rubbing of hands, and not as in cleaning. / As when somethingтАЩs put away, but it wonтАЩt stay down.тАЭ
Regional in the best sense, BakerтАЩs poems capture the universal human commerce of love and conflict enduring under the water towers and storefronts of AmericaтАЩs heartland.
