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 those stories—are relatively few.

A poet's style derives from those local...