Laws of the Land

David Baker

This 1981 collection has a meditative, memoir-like quality that is soothing and compelling, rich and austere. Baker is adept at capturing the placeless place, the timeless time, as in such poems as “Small Confession by the River: A Love Poem,” “Front Porch,” or “Return to the Pond.” The landscape, history, family—past and present—all cast light and reflect off each other under Baker’s elegant hand.

David Baker is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Changeable Thunder, as well as of two critical books, Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement. He currently serves as Professor of English at Denison University where he holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing.

A sample poem from the book

Persimmon Trees, She Remembers, Not Far Away

Your father’s farm was lovely that October. The black barn

leaned like an animal in the sweet field, and the smell

of hay, of smoke, more like a cloud, rose from the land

you said you loved. You’d take me there often,

teach me foal and loft and fallow, though the trees,

the deeper we walked into them, were what you liked best,

their leaves lit with color, their words, you’d say,

as soft and timid as the wind. One place in particular, twenty

minutes from the house, a small patch of persimmon

trees clustered tight as a nest in the middle

of a grass clearing, was your favorite, their leaves

the first to brown and fall. You’d shake their trunks,

laughing, and collect the tiny fruits in the sagging

skin of your clothes, or pull down from their limbs

the more stubborn ones as the soft pulp of those fallen

seeped like cider into the earth beneath your feet.

Then, as we walked back to the house, you’d stop to taste

the sweet-sour kiss of persimmons on my lips, or closer in,

tell me you heard the barn moaning like the old trees

that it had been, before our own parents touched that way.