Carson, Anne - David Baker (review date spring 2002)

David Baker (review date spring 2002)

SOURCE: Baker, David. “Story's Stories.” Kenyon Review 24, no. 2 (spring 2002): 150-67.

[In the following excerpt, Baker explores how elements of narrative are essential to Men in the Off Hours, calling the work “a sustaining achievement.”]

Poets use stories to tell stories. Inside, outside, or alongside the particular narrative of a poem, other frames of reference inevitably operate. This is a feature of serious poetry that especially attracts and compels me—not just the local situation of a poem, but those larger stories, too, obvious or suppressed, mythological or intimate, active or psychological. How complex, after all, are our local narratives? A lover woos, or is abandoned. Someone grieves. Another complains or accuses or, walking down the street, meditates on a cool autumn evening. The details may vary endlessly, but our stories themselves—or the rhetorical structures of...

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