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Reviewed by:
  • Mission Work
  • Rebecca Morgan Frank (bio)
Aaron Baker. Mission Work. Houghton Mifflin.

Aaron Baker's debut collection, Mission Work, begins with the image of pigs screaming as their skulls are bashed in as part of a wedding ceremony, and we are immediately introduced to the poet as observer, as an outsider in the Chimbu province of Papua New Guinea in the 1970s.Some readers might be wary at first of this perspective, fearing cultural appropriation or voyeurism, but by the second poem the poet reveals himself as a child in this world, and this grants license for the wide-eyed notes of the narrator of the first few poems in the collection, an onlooker who sees an unfathomable cultural gap widen before him. Baker invites us in to this perspective at the close of the second poem, "Notebook":

This is how, though I needed for nothing

on the mountainside terrace and in the creek-bottomed canyon,

I came to a place where they killed a pig in my honor

and called me by something much like my name. [End Page 163]

From here the poet changes perspective throughout the collection's other poems, sometimes bearing the role of outsider, sometimes speaking from within the world he renders. He does not endorse or condemn either the purpose and place of the missionaries, his parents, or the culture he is placed in. Instead, he embraces his liminal role, demonstrating and making use of his place as an American child who is both outside of and part of the physical and social worlds he inhabits. One of the more ambitious longer poems, "Commission," works to hold up both viewpoints. At moments this poem becomes bogged down by memory and history as Baker tries to squeeze in the characters of his parents and the people that surround them, build the physical setting, relay events, and express the cultural and spiritual dichotomies, all alongside litanies of language and image. This is a poem of lush imagery and feeling, but which at times speaks more for the content, as if trying to quickly fill us in on the world he knows so well through his memories. But the more compressed lyrics sing like prayers throughout the book as Baker draws on the rhythms of devotion and invocation and zooms the lens close to images of his childhood world. These are pitch-perfect poems in which Baker's cadences and control carry us directly into the moment of each one. Wrapped in tight images, these poems radiate with a deeper resonance than the mergence of cultures through a young boy's eyes, as they offer up the birth of a speaker with a unique and deep-feeling nature, a speaker who experiences the spiritual world through the physical world, a speaker who is well aware of his place as outsider. "See how this works: I'm a dead boy come over the water," begins the poem "Cargo Cult." "Skin pale since it's bloodless, hair bleached blond / by the sun of an unforested country."

The command and the invocation return throughout the book, embracing a spiritual fervor that wraps us not only in the musicality of Baker's rhythms but in the surprise of the object of that passionate speech: the physical world itself, a world full of symbols of two cultures entangled, such as the literal wrapping of an old plane in the trees in "The Zero in the Branches":

Vines spill like a Gorgon's hair

from the cockpit,

birds nest in the guns,

and from the wings, tree spiders spin

sunlight out of hatred from heaven.

Ma" it never reach earth. Ma" it hang there

forever so we can come, as often as needed,

to let its strange peace come over us …

The repeated "May it hang there" calls out for the suspension of the mergence of dualities: human made and nature (or God?) made; Western and "tribal"; or the familiar and the unknown. In the next poem, "How Do you Like your Blue-eyed Boy," Baker returns to invocation: "Let heaven / [End Page 164] happen without me," the speaker chants, and later, "No one's left to sound the alarm. But...

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