“[Baker's] work evinces the moral courage of keeping still in the landscape. . . . He is heir to such writers as Henry David Thoreau . . . and Robert Frost. . . . To read Baker's poems collected in this way is to appreciate the full range of their formal resources, their attunement to cycles and processes rather than to mere outcomes and effects.”
—The New Yorker

“‘The soft pewter sky sets off the black / checkmark bodies of the birds as they skitter,’ writes David Baker, and so background and foreground, stillness and motion are harnessed to describe an outer landscape that also delineates an inner, charged landscape. David Baker’s new and selected poems reveal his keen imagination and the formal mastery that infuse his emotionally resonant work.”
—Arthur Sze, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Compass Rose