David Baker is a poet of American anti-pastoral. His mind operates against the vividly rendered landscape of small-town Ohio, where he has lived for more than thirty years. Baker’s poems depend on long acquaintance with a small place, where year-over-year comparison makes even the arrival of a feeding monarch or a nagging blue jay a standout event. His work evinces the moral courage of keeping still in the landscape: in our era of climate change, poetry’s mandate to measure the rhythms of the year has become a valuable form of witness. Baker’s reports from the interior leave in all the encroachments that threaten it. He is heir to such writers as Henry David Thoreau, who marked the loss of Sudbury River shad after a dam was built upstream, and Robert Frost, who heard in the song of “The Oven Bird” the ominous news that “the highway dust is over all.”

Baker is a professor of English at Denison University and the longtime poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. “Swift: New and Selected Poems” (Norton) samples eight of his collections and adds a ravishing suite of new elegies for his parents. The volume affords a longitudinal view of a sensibility that is itself devoted to observing change over time.

Baker’s early work names preoccupations that he hadn’t quite figured out how to embody, but these balder expressions help pinpoint what is later only implied. “A figure of speech is where desire forces a crisis, a crossing— / one world and its weather suddenly brilliant with meaning,” he writes, in “Snow Figure,” from his third book. Baker, like Yeats, was an elegist even before he’d suffered much loss. In “November: The End of Myth,” from 1985, he scolds himself for his tendency to “mistake such things for signs / and for our sustenance.” A hedge apple fallen on a car’s hood is “not the body / of a green, malignant thought, neither omen nor even / punishment for our evening’s joy.” The presumptuous foisting of significance upon the natural world is a less visible human trespass.

Baker’s poems often veer toward this kind of hubris, then abruptly away. His style is full of second guesses, and as his work matures he makes a virtue of hesitation. “Swift” is organized in reverse chronology, but I started at the back, to watch Baker’s early motifs return and change. The hedge apples reappear, as food for starving deer, not as fodder for symbolism. The deer themselves keep returning, grim timekeepers, seemingly hungrier and in greater numbers. In “Late Pastoral,” from 2005, they are “driven towards us”:

by nothing to forage,

by vanishing trees

and razed fields, by exurbs, by white- flight and our insatiate hunger for size

and space and tax

advantages.

In “Too Many,” a poem published in 2009, the deer have become, in the eyes of Baker’s neighbors, “a menace; plague”—though he sees that the real plague is human sprawl. Nearly running the creature over with his mower, Baker discovers in the tall grasses a

just- come-to-the-

world fawn, speckled,

wet as a trout

His metaphors buckle to contain this extraordinary, delicate sight: the fawn endangered by the plow, a common pastoral motif, is also “like a tan seashell” and a mewing “kitten.” The only conclusion to be drawn is that “there are so many, too // many of us”; and yet “the world keeps making—this makes no sense— / more.”

In his later work, from “Midwest Eclogue” (2005) forward, Baker has troubled the idea that poems might tame the world by metaphor. But he is not dismissive of the human need to try, and he has built a style out of his own and others’ setbacks. In “Hyper,” a beautiful poem about his daughter’s diagnosis of A.D.H.D., Baker describes how seeing four deer in a neighbor’s bean field becomes, for father and daughter alike, an “absolute attention, a fixity.” Both of them must decide what representing the deer requires. The girl, momentarily self-forgetful, is absorbed in her process, “hunkered over her drawing pad, / humming, for an hour.” She edits the four deer down to a classical three and draws the beans in idealized rows. Her father, the poet, keeps qualifying and refining his descriptions. “Then a stillness descended the blue hills,” he writes. After a beat, as though doubting the word: “I say stillness.” By the end of the poem, he has settled on a version of a sentence that the reader has seen him struggle to get right: “We watched four deer in stillness walking there.” It’s in perfect iambic pentameter.

Baker’s poems swerve with tangents and reversals, and often move forward by branching out. Sometimes you feel the tension between the torrent of language and the rigid banks of his chosen stanza forms. In “The Rumor,” from 2009, a poem about a “big cat,” probably a mountain lion, in the nearby countryside, he describes the remnants of a deer’s corpse at the base of a beech tree:

Consider thus

the tufts and tail piece,

hooves cleft from the legs, the legs

what’s left of them where they dropped con-

centric beneath

the beech.

The abrupt line breaks suggest a formal face-off between composure and violence that in some ways mimics the animal’s struggle. But Baker can also moderate tension to allow sentences and the effects they describe to unfold at their own pace, as in this lambent description of monarch butterflies:

Migrant, they’re more than two dozen today,

more long-lived than the species who keep

to the localized gardens—they’re barely

a gram apiece, landing, holding still for

the common milkweed that feeds their larvae,

or balanced on bridges of plume grass stalks,

and bottlebrush, wings fanning, closing, calmed

by the long searchlight stems of hollyhock.

The present participles (“landing,” “holding,” “fanning,” “closing”) keep the sentence, and the butterfly, open to change, before a single past participle, “calmed,” gives both a place to rest. Never a partisan of any single poetic school or creed, Baker is free to toggle between tactics of attention. His forms vary depending upon what his senses perceive: jagged and tense around a mountain lion, long and languid next to a butterfly.

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—their patience over the long haul. He sees little economies everywhere he looks. In “The Spring Ephemerals,” a trillium belongs to a complex ecosystem of “rue anemone, masses // of colt’s foot, wild ginger, blood root and may- / apples, bracken and fiddlehead fern.” The entire catalogue, which sounds like something from Milton’s “Lycidas,” is in fact a list of fragile plants “imperiled by road graders,” their tenuous network disrupted.

Baker is a poet of systems, and of the interrelatedness of apparently discrete phenomena. A poem about an empty field is also, of necessity, a poem about developers, zoning boards, and town meetings. The poems are often themselves complex systems, their vocabularies interlocking like machine parts. Now, assembled as a whole, the machines can be perceived as an even larger operation—a mind susceptible to change, alert to the conditions that effect it. A long, astonishing sequence in “Scavenger Loop,” from 2015, begins with a trash picker and passes through Facebook shares and likes, cell mutations, G.M.O.s, and compost. Each of these threads tracks, with intelligence that feels both adversarial to lyric poetry and vital to it, the metastatic path of matter. The poem is an elegy for Baker’s mother, but there’s something in it for everyone to grieve. ♦