Treatise on Touch Paperback / softback

'Ohio Fields After Rain' - The slow humped backs of ice ceased to shadow the savannahs of Ohio millennia ago, right where we've sailed to a stop.

The shaken woman leaves open her car door and familiar as relatives we touch hands in the middle of the wet, black road.

To the north new corn enriches by the hour. South of us - really, just over a fence - heavy boulders rolled thousands of miles quit the migration and grew down, huddled, cropped, scarred by the journey. "I couldn't," she says, "stop skidding," and I know what she means, having felt the weight of my car planing a scant millimetre over the highway glaze.

Calmly she slid to one shoulder, I to the other, and the earth spun onward without us.

What a place we have come to, scooped hollow of hillsides, cut valleys, drumlins and plains. And where the rain settles, the grey beasts growing tame on the shore. "Treatise on Touch" is a selection from all six of American poet David Baker's collections of poetry to date, all of which have met with critical acclaim in the US. Full of the most exquisite descriptions of the natural world alongside equally detailed observations of the human condition, this collection is lyric poetry at its best.

David Baker is one more voice from America that will make itself heard with increasing force in British literary circles.