David Baker will never be cool, and his poems admit it: he’s serious, sad, inescapably middle-aged in a rust-belt exurb, where he takes long walks in far-off fields and reads books about centuries-obsolete medicine: “Let this body taketh / away sorrow,” his poem “Resurrection Man” quotes; “Let it asswageth furie of the mind / with our hoard of bones.” When he’s not learning the Latin names of plants, or reading very old poetry, he thinks about how to be a good father, and how to get over (if he can ever get over) what seems to be a recent divorce. Being a husband was hard work, and he loved it; being a former husband is harder, and worse, and the resulting resignation and bitterness make this book sharper and stronger than the calmer poems that Baker has written before.

—Stephen Burt