What has given David Baker his early critical success is that Baker's voice, at its best, is a combination of the voices that most readers carry with them. He can share mystery and nostalgia. But he is equally as likely to offer a glimpse of fragile selves, frightened faces staring into water or lost somewhere in the dark. His poems look forward and backward from a steady middle, however; readers tend to feel at home in them.

David Anthony Baker was born in Bangor, Maine, on 27 December 1954, to Donald and Martha Fowler Baker. David's father is a state highway department administrator and his mother a secretary. The family moved to Missouri when Baker was one, and in a 1983 interview with John Neilson and Samuel Truitt, he described growing up in a "half-Ozark, half plains, midwestern farm area." He started to write poetry as a sophomore at Central Missouri...