Changeable Thunder: Poems

By David Baker

Book Overview

Changeable Thunder marks David Baker's emergence as a major contemporary poet. To his abiding sense of the Midwest -- its politics, people, and landscapes -- Baker adds a powerful historical... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1557287155
• ISBN13: 9781557287151
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Length: 97 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The sacred and the whatever

I tried to think of a clever line to sum up what this book has accomplished. I couldn't. Changeable Thunder is haunted by the voices of dead poets--borrowings woven into Baker's poems. These, along with the invocations of Puritan evangelicism, achieve the effect of a solemn, luminous pall over poems about the state of "progress" in the Midwest, in suburbia, in our cities. The candlelit sacred side-by-side with hookers/heroin-heads works well; lending a sordidness and austerity to both. Baker's vision (manifested in these seemingly oppositional forces) seems to be a re-working of the state of an artist, or even the endeavors of human life--lived between memory and the imagination; past and future--a bridge that fails to span two shores and yet remains lifted, straddling both and seeming to float above deceptively clear waters.

A Firm Place to Stand

David Baker's "Changeable Thunder" offers a cross-section of contemporary American verse. Here are ekphrastic works, personal narratives, intertextual postmodern dialogues, and brief lyrics that treat of the book's several thematic pivots: exhaustion, care, place, and the artifice involved in poetry (or any art). Baker described this book as an attempt at "the ventriloquist's art", and many poems incorporate pieces of journals or other poems, as though they'd fed on textual bodies and were in the process of digestion - and these poems convey much of the admiration, mystification, and sympathy Baker feels for their human subjects. "The Rainbow" serves as the most powerful example; in it, Baker liberates the confessional mode from its insular self-pity by interlarding journal entries from the 17th-century Puritan minister Samuel Sewall, expanding the sympathetic framework enough to allow lines like "I'm worried / that my daughter may recall / my temper only, or my / little soul, my careless way / of cutting others down" to bypass the anti-sentimental sentry modern readers tend to have internalized, and enacting the speaker's search for sympathy, solidarity, ultimate meaning, and salvation. Sewall's rapturous attention to weather bespeaks an engaged way of living that Baker wants to champion over jaded detachment: "Now I only work to make a toy. / My colleagues call that irony. / (Our meager making wants to / theorize each life we touch to death.)" This sentiment extends to an argument for locality (Baker's latest book of poems is entitled "Midwest Eclogue") against a bodiless experimentalism, which Baker makes explicit in a narrative-parable about a dead neighbor's farm being auctioned off in "Midwest: Georgics": "I wish I were like the famous poet / - disembodied, voice out of nowhere - / postmodern and uninvolved." It is an argument that asks us to embrace tragedy, our own particular tragedy, as a mark of our authentic being: "Bad weather, / as we say, bad as it comes, when what we / mean is luck, money, love: anything but / ash, berry-brambles, the trash when we've gone." This trash, "ash-berry" rambles, is anathema to the kind of responsiveness to environs Baker seeks to embody in his work - an engaged grapple where life itself is at stake, not just aesthetics or fine ironies: "I wish we could all be like the poet, / out-of-body, misrepresentative / of our bad luck and lot, no one's story. / But this is what it means to have our life. / It means wanting to fly off on each wind." Baker is unusual insofar as most of the poems address this struggle, suffering, without reaching redemption. It is as though the act of poetry itself, or any generative act, stands in for an absent savior. Even those poems that offer some peace involve leaving, as in "After Rain": "You have to turn your back to the animals. / . . . / ...it's the long, continuous sighing / breath of the file that stills them, for they know / you are through .... / You watch them / brea

A Haunting, Powerful Collection

This book is terrific: elegant yet plain-spoken, learned yet deeply human. Many of these poems sound like a straight-shot out of Whitman, but then they are counterbalanced with tender, quiet lyrics with the tone and delicacy of James Wright. As Wright himself put it, this is the poetry of a grown man. In a time of so much ironic, self-conscious writing, this is that rare thing: a book of sincere, heart-breaking beauty.

Another beautiful book of poems by David Baker

Here is the master of the love poem at it again. There are so many tender poems, erotic poems, poems of devotion...and these are mingled with grave and ambitious longer poems that mix history and contemporary sorrows. There's a great poem here on Walt Whitman's unknown novel about the perils of drinking, another that features a wild and slothful Percy Shelley...all are full of imaginative sympathy, and they're beautiful too. I'm so happy to add this book to my collection.