Baker, Ernest Everhart — Collected Poems

Ernest Everhart Baker carried a Salem lawyer’s training into two very different books of verse. The Heart of the Last Frontier ranges across Oregon trails, mining camps, sailors, workers, city streets, love poems, ballads, and comic monologues; twelve years later, after Baker had turned toward Los Angeles, A Mocking Bird in Spring Street compressed that roaming imagination into a quick, handmade book full of city birds, seafarers, myths, jokes, and memories of the Northwest. Baker designed the first book’s cover and helped make the second with William B. Straube and the printers of the Quoin. This edition brings the two books together, resets their poems in original order, and lets the shift from expansive frontier narrative to nimble metropolitan lyric appear as one career.