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Review: Alan Baker, A Book of Psalms (Shearsman, 2026)
In a recent interview with Kelvin Corcoran, Alan Baker said that ‘by calling a poem a psalm, you link it to a larger history . . . What drives the psalms is the urge to create objects in language that sing about the world, lamenting its sadness and celebrating what we can’. [1] Through this ‘larger history’, the psalm as a poetic form is inseparable from the range of sociopolitical impulses that have driven its English reception. Inheriting the completed book, English readers have only added to the psalms. The production of psalters, effectively anthologies of liturgical practice, in the early Medieval period reflects a need to mobilise the Word. Vernacular translations and marginal annotations of the Book of Psalms make up some of the earliest instances of hermeneutic practice in English literature, offering a series of snapshots of the development of the language, almost always with an aim of increasing the circulation of Christian teaching. [2] All this before even reaching the syncretic King James Version. Many canonical poets from the Early Modern period onwards wrote their own transliterations of the psalms, injecting their own allusions and commentaries depending on purpose. [3] This isn’t necessarily what Baker has in mind when he describes the ‘social function’ of the psalms, referring to the status of the biblical prophets as agents of political critique, but we should notice how the title of his new collection, A Book of Psalms fronts the quality of being a book, using the indefinite article to evade the authoritative claims of the book. In Baker’s earlier collection, A Book of Odes (Red Ceilings Press, 2023), this aspect doesn’t have the same resonance. The material history of the Book of Psalms informs how we now receive its poetic and spiritual contents, the constitutive problem of any modern reading; C.S. Lewis represented this well by attempting to derive a univocal meaning from the biblical psalms at book-length, navigating their disparate objects and motivations, their meanings inflected over time. [4] Questioning the relations between inherently political poetry and poetry that works outwardly towards political ends, and between freedom and its possible representation in poetry, Baker’s collection recalls the figure of Orc in William Blake’s America: A Prophecy, scattering the ‘torn book’ of religion’s ‘stony law’: ‘and none shall gather the leaves’. [5]
A ‘larger history’ of the psalm includes not only the biblical psalms but also histories internal to poetry. Paul Celan, Adonis, and George Oppen comprise a small group we could call ‘latter-day psalmists’, each not only writing individual psalms but also exploring the possibility of an afterlife for the form as a whole. Linked by more than the name of a poem, each saw (roughly at the same time) that the psalm would survive the death of the God capable of answering it. The biblical psalmist often finds, within a single psalm, that their initial expression of lament has been heard, they are certain of it, though they can only show it with a change of tone. KJV ‘Psalm 88’ is a significant exception; the psalmist’s lamentation is never heard, their suffering relentless, they remain in utter isolation when the psalm ends: ‘Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness’. An outlier in the original Book, this psalm now depicts the condition of all latter-day psalmists. Baker’s idea of ‘what drives the psalms’ contains more than a hint of Objectivist influence, and to this end Oppen’s psalm is used as an epigraph: ‘The small nouns / Crying faith’. Lament and praise are fine categories to compare Oppen’s hymnal tone, the sheer amazement at the presence and existence of things, with the melancholic absence of Celan’s psalm, cunningly substituting the name ‘No one’ for God; but couldn’t these aims be attributed to a range of other poetic forms? Is it that the psalm is already lyrical, or vice versa that lyric sings just like a psalm – as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it in relation to Celan, ‘that poetry in its essence is prayer, and conversely, that every prayer is a poem?’ [6]
Godless but not profane, the world of Baker’s book is the result of turning all these resources to new uses. Problems of lyric consolation and political representation are established from the start. ‘Psalm 1’ begins amidst separately-unfolding perceptions, not waiting to be cohered by the roving eye of the psalmist, but rather hanging there unresolved:
A smoky bar in blurred light, men playing cards
A crowded bus, a stray dog sniffing at litter bins
A mood of turbulent change throughout the nation
I sat outside the cafe, falling in love with every passer-by
Living on the margins of the world in the twilight
Throughout A Book of Psalms, Baker never uses end stops, so we rely on sense and syntax to infer the relations between lines. Punctuation is sometimes implied by the flow, whilst at other moments the absence of commas or full-stops generates ambiguities: is it the psalmist or the passers-by who ‘live on the margins’? The answer is seemingly both. We’re reminded again of Oppen, the glory of small nouns or separate, self-contained events and the fitful effects of their seriality. Discrete listing encourages us to read ‘a mood of turbulent change throughout the nation’ as another term in the series, and not its sum in the mind of the psalmist. We arrive at a hollowed-out nationalism, each person in a country of one, both inside and outside ‘the nation’, which the poetic imagination seems unable to induce from its array of particulars.
Baker and Corcoran discuss a relatively continuous process of composition for each psalm, one which dredges up familiar references from poetry and prayer, as well as a plenitude of concepts from other discourses (biochemistry, data science, ornithology…), in streams of thought that allow their relationships and tensions to develop. The psalmist’s impetus towards celebrating the power of divine fiat becomes, in Baker, a means of complicating any ultimate ground for the explanation of things that make up the world’s complex texture, and therefore a suspension of lyric transcendence in the name of political representation. (‘While you’re contemplating the Andromeda Galaxy, don’t forget the people who can’t pay their rent’, remarks Baker to Corcoran. [7]) This manifests as a suspicion towards potential misuses of poetic speech as a propaganda technique, and a recognition that truth is bound to systems of utterance:
[…] Anyone who can write and articulate with sufficient adroitness
Can make the credulous believe anything
Is nothing, is cell replication and enzyme catalyst and substrate
But lead me not into the arms of the Enzyme Appreciation Society
But remember, yea, we wept when we remembered
Her towers and citadels, squares and meandering alleys
When life, like a shot of coffee, set light to every morning (‘Psalm 10’)
Baker often insinuates snatches of biblical cadence and tones into the poems (KJV ‘Psalm 137’ here), noticeable by awkward or anachronistic textures. (‘But… / But’, the spelling of ‘yea’.) ‘Psalm 10’ strikes an invective note, with four lines of cynical criticism – and might we say adroit? – of the mass-deceived ‘credulous’ and those who deceive them with wily rhetoric, compared to the desacralizing ‘nothing’ of biochemical jargon, the temptation (‘lead me not into…’) of reducing all things to this. But then the psalmist can’t maintain their cynicism, drawn into the rhetoric of remembrance and into a collective voice through the words of KJV ‘Psalm 137’.
A frequent theme in A Book of Psalms is how complex or emergent phenomena – from the specific activities of insect swarms and bird migrations to nationhood as such, between its individual and collective memories – can be comprehended and politicised. The language that describes these phenomena, and the poetry that celebrates them, has to traverse the separation between each and all. The substantial reality of one sparrow, versus the shared reality of a host. Across 64 psalms, Baker interlaces symbols across multiple frames of reference, so that sparrows fly through St. Bede’s banquet hall, through an Amazon warehouse, into the psalmist’s dreams; but then their collective absences are also marked, leading to reflections on the environmental causes of thwarted migration patterns. Psalms 21-28 make a kind of sequence, dwelling intermittently on insect swarms that populate the summertime, which the psalmist reads variously as signs of environmental collapse (‘And I ask, where are the insectivores, the swift and martin / On their long haul’), provocations to sublime reflection (‘Their anatomy unchanged across geological time’), or eco-ethical propositions (‘Can I make accommodation with them, their stings and burrowing?’). However, Baker is also attuned to the morphing imagery of the biblical psalmist, an effect of parallelism often taken to be the psalm’s primary poetic quality; Baker’s other epigraph is taken from KJV ‘Psalm 102’: ‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top’. Gathering up the lore and fables behind insect swarms, Baker cross-contaminates them with contemporary scientific explanations. If the swarms are
[…] Presences once put down to witchcraft, now
To sub-optimal chemical and biological conditions
And soil nutrient imbalance (‘Psalm 22’)
then the sheer diversity of their forms freshly poses the question of how any such phenomena are ‘put down’, naturalised against their own natures.
Submitting national memory to a similar treatment, A Book of Psalms remains in dialogue with some of Baker’s previous work. Though no longer working through the Geordie vernacular poetics of When Did It Aal Gan Wrang (Open House Editions, 2022), Baker is still attuned to the forms of locality and community that are the psalmist’s landscape, the forms of reflection that erasure and loss demand:
The nations’ voices echo in snowy woods
Our blueprints and seeking (‘Psalm 10’)
Like the wrinkles of an old man’s hand the valleys of England grasp
The past as if it were breathable air, mine-workings and hill-top forts
Six-lane highways, water-treatment plants, ridge-and-furrow pasture
And a tomorrow that will offer up its lack of surprises (‘Psalm 32’)
Always there is a hint at an elusive ‘northern / Celestial City’ (‘Psalm 45’), appearing ghost-like in the interference pattern of past and present poetic energies. Once again Blake is an influence: compared to the sprawling, heavenly city constructed again in each pulsation of the poet’s artery, [8] Baker’s psalmist speaks with the urgency of a quickening heart:
Steady my irregular heartbeat, song, my ventricular rhythm
My heart rebels as if it didn’t want to be a servant any more (‘Psalm 7’)
Around us, The City, skeleton of half-demolished mall
The miraculous library, new and nervous, the indigo busses
Black cabs telling their histories at 4am to drunken girls
My uncertain pulse and hypertension, my tachycardia, enemies all (‘Psalm 39’)
The heartbeat materialises a spirit of negativity, rebelling and making enemies, like an autoimmune rejection of the circumstances it finds itself in. However, Baker’s psalmist is less sure than Blake was of the efficacy of their imaginative acts. All time cannot be gathered up in one cycle of the psalmist’s circulatory system, the miraculous not perfectly rendered in the everyday; ‘the world,’ Baker says, ‘always intrudes’. [9] At one point, beggars on the street interrupt the psalmist’s speculation on the lived experiences of insects and their cultural representations, the way they ‘permeate folklore’ (‘Psalm 27’). The psalmist realises that ‘despite every attempt / To eradicate’ the beggars,
they may well outlive us, may well have arrived
On interplanetary rock and still existing in that form
May endure long after we have gone
For all abjection and effacement – compare with the KJV ‘Psalm 109’, railing against the wicked and deceitful: ‘Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg’ – the wretched of the earth are a remainder to any holistic myth, national or otherwise, of progress. Alternating between ‘they’ and ‘we’, them and us, it’s never clear to which side the psalmist belongs. So they welcome the world when it intrudes. These caesurae within the psalms offer a historicising corrective to any idealised form of community and any claims it might make to metaphysical permanence. ‘What was, what is, and what shall be, the future an invented memory’, intones ‘Psalm 58’, ‘As if the wind could formulate equations and use them against us’. Baker’s psalms are about becoming equal to crises of collectivity across experiential scales, redistributing the rights to invent the future. Teasing messianic possibility, ‘Psalm 41’ asks: ‘But what if He were to come back from red-brick terraces / From cranes and warehouses on the river of a vanished summer’. The psalm ends:
[…] Round a coal fire, tongues of flame keeping the darkness at bay
The starling on the washing line is running out of songs
You don’t want, you don’t need to richly provide for yourselves
Just a psalm for comfort or confusion
Notes
[1] ‘“On a bright morning when all the possibilities settle as one”: Alan Baker interviewed by Kelvin Corcoran, November 2025’, Tears in the Fence No. 83 (Spring 2026), pp. 159-64 (164).
[2] Francis Leneghan, ‘Introduction: A Case Study of Psalm 50.1-3 in Old and Middle English’, The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Francis Leneghan (D.S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 1-36.
[3] The Poets’ Book of Psalms, ed. by Laurence Wieder (Oxford UP, 1995).
[4] C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Fount, 1998).
[5] William Blake, America: A Prophecy (1793).
[6] Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. by Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford UP, 1999), pp. 79.
[7] ‘On a bright morning’, pp. 163.
[8] Blake, Milton: A Poem in Two Books.
[9] ‘On a bright morning’, pp. 163.
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