The title of David Baker’s most recent collection of poems comes, significantly, from Hesiod:

These days are a great boon to men on the ground; the others
are of changeable thunder, doomless, bringing nothing at all.
Different persons praise different days, but few really know.

        The twenty-seven poems in Changeable Thunder are organized into three sections, nine poems in each section. An epigraph from Pindar, "In a single moment of time/Many are the winds that blow this way and that," introduces the first section; the Hesiod epigraph introduces the middle section; an epigraph from Proba, "And so the year turns over and over on itself,/ Traces the tracks it has laid many times before. . . ," introduces the final nine poems. 
          Within these relatively small groupings of poems, David Baker presents a fascinating diversity: There is, to begin, "Benton’s Clouds," a 60 line, fifteen-stanza commentary on both the story-art of Thomas Hart Benton and the real art of a present moment ". . . standing in the grinding rain. . . too soon to tell what damages/ there would be, though we knew, as in his art. . . there was peril ahead"; there is, in the middle section, "Simonides’ Stone," in which the overheard "fuckin’ trippin’" cry-celebration of a homeless man bedding down "on steep steps leading / to a gated brownstone" leads to the speaker’s consideration of Simonides’ "measuring his inspiration against the size/ of his writing surface"; and there is, in the final section, "Two Clouds," a soliloquy on marriage, interleaved with four haiku-like echoes, ending in a question–"Who knows when/ it will end?"–answered with delicate optimism: "I don’t know/ and it lifts me."
          And along with diversity, Baker demonstrates a professional concern for technique. Kevin Walzer, in The Ghost of Tradition, Expansive Poetry and Postmodernism, noted that–in the 1980s–"a number of poets individually dissatisfied with the prevailing modes of poetic style. . . . devoted themselves to reviving traditional form and narrative, which had, with few exceptions, been marginalized as aesthetic practice in American poetry for much of the twentieth century." Although I would not, necessarily, identify Baker as an Expansive poet, it is certainly obvious–not only in the poems in Changeable Thunder but also in poems in Baker’s earlier collections–that attention both to traditional form and to narrative are strong components of his poetic aesthetic.
          To elaborate: Of the 27 poems in Changeable Thunder, 24 are predominantly regular syllabic verse: ten-syllable lines, or variants. "Simonides’ Stone," noted above, is a modified version of Sapphic meter; "The Rainbow," "Dejection," "To Winter," "The City of God," "The Puritan Way of Death," "That Moon," "Works and Days," are all in carefully controlled multi-lined stanzas, usually with five syllables in each line or pair of short lines, less frequently with eight syllables–as in "The Rainbow"–or six syllables–as in "Fade-Out: A Lover’s Discourse"; "Two Clouds" is a tour de force of three-syllable lines–both in the poem proper and in the four haiku echoes.
          With regard to narrative, consider the indicators, for example, in "Benton’s Clouds": ". . . where the future is not coming/but is already part of the story"; in "Pulp Fiction": "But now the cruel gang spots someone–okay, it’s me–who is writing this whole scene down"; in "The Rainbow": "I keep this/story close whenever I grieve or fear, growing cold"; in "Separation": "There is nothing else /but stars and star-stories, which, like your heart,/are clearer the greater grows the darkness"; in "Midwest: Georgics": "I wish we could all be like the poet,/out of body, misrepresentative/of our bad luck and lot, no one’s story"; in "Mr. Whitman’s Book": "The story is so good it tells itself."
          Since Laws of the Land (1981)–and through a series of remarkable books of poetry (Haunts, 1985; Sweet Home, Saturday Night, 1991; After the Reunion, 1994; The Truth about Small Towns, 1998)–David Baker, poetry editor of The Kenyon Review and Professor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College, has been involved in the poet’s task of praising the days. If, as Hesiod has written, few really know whether those days are a great boon or doomless, then Baker’s poems in the present collection stand as earnest of every poet’s commitment–whether knowing or unknowing–to that task of praise.