{"id":115860,"date":"2017-09-22T09:01:03","date_gmt":"2017-09-22T13:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=115860"},"modified":"2017-09-22T13:40:14","modified_gmt":"2017-09-22T17:40:14","slug":"reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s The Peregrine<\/i> in Fall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was autumn and warm, late evening, and the shadows were as long as the hot busses that hissed and braked alongside the main library\u2019s midwestern utilitarian grim, lifting trails of dead leaves like a breath of smoke in their wake as they rumbled toward the river. I read the dedication in J. A. Baker\u2019s The Peregrine<\/em>, \u201cTo My Wife,\u201d before dropping the book in my backpack and unlocking my bike. I found it somewhat cheering. At least this neglected author managed to find someone. But over the decades, many readers\u2014I later learned\u2014had come to debate this. They said he never had a wife. They said he lived alone; he was a librarian; he was sick when he wrote the book, hence the melancholy that colors his prose. Others said it was not prose but poetry, while others insisted it wasn\u2019t nonfiction but a novel. Even certain filmmakers wanted to lay claim to the text. Werner Herzog told a Rio audience to quit film school. If they wanted to make a movie they had only to read one book: The Peregrine<\/em>. Classic Herzogian hyperbole, I thought, pushing my bike uphill across the dried grass toward the old capital.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know it then, but when J. A. Baker was writing his book, the birds themselves stood on the brink of extinction. Pesticides had created the birdless Silent Spring <\/em>Rachel Carson announced several years earlier. Baker did not anticipate their survival, and his book is less a work of environmental nonfiction than an aching and ecstatic elegy for a dying world. It was fitting perhaps that his book, with its vibrant avocado green flyleaf, the color of 1960s linoleum, had weathered its own private extinction. In the nearly fifty years that the university library had offered the title, it had only been checked out four times.\u00a0The Date Due slip was last stamped in 1974. A dull $4.95 had been penciled on the top right corner. The book hadn\u2019t just been lost, it was dead. It had been dead a long time. They couldn\u2019t even sell it.<\/p>\n

Along the river, the trees bristled in full autumn\u00a0plumage. And I thought of the farms behind them and the endless fields of corn, their husks hard, fruit ripe for harvest. There was nothing romantic about Iowa. I considered the whole state merely a factory floor devoted to the production of futile biofuels and fattening corn syrup, but I\u2019d come from Southern California, the land of a single season, the land of no leaves, where the sunshine\u2019s monotony produced its own brand of laid-back insanity, and the bouquet of bright trees, burnished red and gold and groaning, ready to succumb before the earth\u2019s slow orbit that day stung me as I stood in the thralldom of yet another fall.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At the top of the hill, I sat down on the steps. I pulled out the book. An object so forsaken ought to enjoy an evening like this, I thought. Across the river to the north, two hawks swam inside the dusk\u2019s dusty amber. Busses thrummed below. I began to read: \u201cAutumn begins my season of hawk hunting \u2026 I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger.\u201d It occurred to me that the flyleaf was not avocado, and it didn\u2019t belong to linoleum. It was the color of dying grass. And the fragrance wasn\u2019t that of stale cardboard but fresh autumn leaves, and The Peregrine<\/em> wasn\u2019t a work of zoology but, to my astonishment, a glorious evocation of the moment in which I sat, in which I\u2019m still sitting today, holding that abandoned book, which I never returned, attempting to recapture that glorious autumn and Baker\u2019s astonishing prose, in which \u201ca fragrance of neglect still lingers, like a ghost of fallen grass.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is always refreshing to find one\u2019s pessimism put to shame. Seldom have I ever had any expectations so thoroughly denuded as that autumn day. Baker\u2019s masterpiece is still, no doubt, one of the most glorious and neglected in the English language. \u201cI came late to the love of birds,\u201d J. A. Baker writes, and I, too, came late to love his Peregrine<\/em>. It causes me pain sometimes. Not because I stole his book\u2014I still have it\u2014but because it took so long to save.<\/p>\n

Of course, I didn\u2019t save Baker\u2019s book, only a copy of it. But others more worthy than myself have been trying. New York Review of Books Classics reissued The Peregrine<\/em> (and it\u2019s dry-green flyleaf) in 2005, with an excellent introduction by Robert McFarlane, after it languished out of print for decades. A later HarperCollins edition, from 2010, clarifies the autobiographical \u201cnothing\u201d of Baker\u2019s life and includes his second and last work, The Hill of Summer<\/em>, as well as an essay and journal fragments.<\/p>\n

The Peregrine<\/em>, itself written in the form of a journal, begins: \u201cOctober 1st. Autumn rises into the bright sky. Corn is down. Fields shine after harvest.\u201d My luck felt creepy those first few weeks. I took the book home from the library on September 25, and come early October, I began to follow Baker each day, wherever he went, out of autumn and into a freezing Iowa winter and the author\u2019s own snowbound season in East Anglia. While reading, I told nobody about the book. It was a secret that I guarded carefully. I followed Baker\u2019s\u00a0advice: \u201cBe alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to fear.\u201d I knew right off, from the opening pages, that I had something spectacular on\u00a0my hands, and I feared that if I told anyone about the book,\u00a0word may spread and someone might request it. Waking in the cold mornings of early winter, I\u2019d look forward to the ritual. While the radiator clicked vainly in the corner, I\u2019d stand before the stove, boiling water in my ramshackle mini A-frame cabin, breath visible in white plumes while the book lay behind me on the table. The old unwanted book\u2014brittle, frayed and forgotten\u2014contained a sacred power, a fragile breath of campfire, that warmed me each morning with my coffee. It continued to warm me over the many months that I carried it, withdrawing, like Baker, from human contact as I ventured further toward the edge of things, into the uncertain ecstasy, isolation, and obsession not of bird-watching but book writing. It didn\u2019t take me the full nine months to read The Peregrine. <\/em>It took me seven. I never read ahead but followed Baker\u2019s journal entries dutifully, keeping pace, never advancing, only flipping back if I desired to go on reading.<\/p>\n

Baker and I emerged together in April after the thaw. I finished the book after seven months, on the fourth of April, the date of Baker\u2019s final entry, the day before my birthday.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

My copy is now over three years overdue. I guess I do feel bad about that. But something tells me people have not been lining up to check it out. I hope sincerely that this will change. Perhaps I\u2019ll ship it back. The librarian can put it where it belongs, front and center among the featured titles. J. A. Baker\u2019s prose shouldn\u2019t\u00a0be a carefully guarded secret. Rather, we should read him regularly and with rapture. I encourage you to purchase Baker\u2019s book, or better, rescue it from the basement of your local library and follow him this fall. Don\u2019t read ahead. If you race through, you will quickly find yourself burnt out by a heat that, properly, doesn\u2019t belong to a campfire, but more, the conflagration of inspiration that must have gripped our early ancestors, driving them mad, propelling them into the basements of black caves where they painted pictures of birds and lions, horses and bulls, in a desperate attempt to articulate something of the natural world\u2019s overwhelming terror and beauty.<\/p>\n

Baker\u2019s art rises from a similar impulse. And his incantatory prose forces us, like a shaman or lyric poet, to step outside ourselves and into the edge of things. \u201cThe hunter must become the thing he hunts,\u201d Baker says. Ekstasis<\/em>. It\u2019s no wonder, considering such films as Cave of Forgotten Dreams <\/em>and Grizzly Man<\/em>, that Herzog admires him. It helps, too, that he and Baker both share a deep but upbeat pessimism. \u201cBefore it is too late,\u201d Baker writes, \u201cI have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baker\u2019s\u00a0greatest achievement lies not only in his ability to recapture through realism the freshness of a primitive gaze\u2014a perception akin to animism, wherein all of nature appears alive, imbued with agency, animated by secret force\u2014but also his invention of language that can translate this previously inarticulate world. In Baker\u2019s prose, we read not of a dying world but rather one alive, born anew each day from darkness. \u201cYesterday is dim and monochrome. A week ago you were not born. Persist, endure, follow, watch.\u201d The book is, in effect, a gut-wrenching anachronistic dispatch of genuine awe, a poem seemingly penned before the invention of the gods, and as such it is wholly unsullied by sentiment or New Age tinsel. If it contains any flaw, it lies in Baker stating, on page nine, that \u201cdetailed descriptions of landscapes are tedious,\u201d and then proceeding to paint upon every page the most detailed and sensorily stunning descriptions of natural landscape that exist in language. The fact he accomplishes all this in the humble well-trodden English countryside, in a territory less than\u00a0fifty\u00a0miles from London, makes the book all the more remarkable.<\/p>\n

Yet for all the talk of awe and astonishment, The Peregrine <\/em>is a quiet book. Many might dare call it boring. Its journal structure is repetitive. The intensity of the prose, distilled to the point of poetry, might chafe a hurried reader. There are no characters, not a line of dialogue. No proper names. No plot really. If there is one, it\u2019s not particularly riveting; it\u2019s just Baker drawing closer to the birds he observes and, in so doing, withdrawing from his own species, evolving backward into something more primitive and perhaps more pure. \u201cWherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life \u2026 My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.\u201d The landscape is curiously divested of human beings. It\u2019s a narrative conceit similar to that of W. G. Sebald, whose Rings of Saturn <\/em>inhabits the same desolate stretch of English coastline, and indeed, the only human figure that Baker\u2019s pagan gaze ever lands on could very well have been Sebald himself, then freshly arrived in England in midsixties, and who may have been lost during one of his early peregrinations: \u201cAt three o\u2019clock, a man walked along the sea-wall, flapping with maps. Five thousand dunlin flew low inland, twenty feet above his head. He did not see them.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is present in The Peregrine<\/em>, however, beyond one of the most fiercely passionate evocations of nature in the English language, is a technique of description, a technique of ecstasy, really, that has the ability to transform the way you see, to cleanse the window\u2019s perception as it were, and reveal the world in all it\u2019s pure and infinite primal glory. By osmosis, reading slowly, you may find, like Baker, that your \u201ceye becomes insatiable for hawks. It clicks toward them with ecstatic fury … \u201d Or you may notice more modest things. \u201cUnder the wind, a wren, in sunlight among fallen leaves in a dry ditch,\u201d may seem \u201csuddenly divine, like a small brown priest in a parish of dead leaves and wintry hedges, devoted til death.\u201d Sitting outside the library, waiting for the bus this fall, you may find that it\u2019s \u201cone of those rare autumn days, calm under high cloud, mild, with patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist.\u201d Perhaps, off in the distance, your \u201cfeeble human eye\u201d may see a distant murmuration of starlings \u201crise into the sunset, like smoke above a sacrifice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our species isn\u2019t that old, and yet we forget. In the blink of an eye, we crawled out from the caves, swept across the globe like a cancer, and after two hundred and fifty\u00a0years of industrial civilization, we appear to be pushing all life toward the brink of extinction. \u201cWe are the killers,\u201d Baker writes. \u201cWe stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.\u201d It\u2019s comforting that Baker\u2019s pessimism was also put to shame. The peregrines did survive. But there\u2019s no guarantee today, neither for them or ourselves. In this age of encroaching environmental meltdown, before the only awe and astonishment left to us is our foolishness, we might do well to retrain our gaze. Perhaps we still have time. Although we live in a dying world, like Mars, it\u2019s still glowing. And it shines especially bright in Baker\u2019s masterpiece, The Peregrine.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Barret Baumgart is the author of\u00a0<\/em>China Lake: A Journey into the Contradicted Heart of\u00a0a\u200b\u00a0Global Climate Catastrophe<\/a>, which won the 2016 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction.\u00a0\u200bHis writing has appeared in <\/em>The Gettysburg Review, <\/em>The\u00a0Iowa Review, <\/em>Literary Review, <\/em>Guernica, and <\/em>Vice, among others. \u200b<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft.   It was autumn and warm, late evening, and the shadows were as long as the hot busses that hissed and braked alongside the main library\u2019s midwestern utilitarian grim, lifting trails of dead leaves like a breath of smoke […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1255,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30695],"tags":[19652,7393,30699,30702,24009,661,30696,7881,1082,13438,1022,30701,30698,21043,30703,27432,30700,30697,722,2216],"class_list":["post-115860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stolen","tag-autumn","tag-birds","tag-corn","tag-ekstasis","tag-hawks","tag-iowa","tag-j-a-baker","tag-landscape","tag-library","tag-naturalism","tag-nature","tag-oddity-of-man","tag-pesticides","tag-rachel-carson","tag-rings-of-saturn","tag-silent-spring","tag-the-hill-of-summer","tag-the-peregrine","tag-w-g-sebald","tag-werner-herzog"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReading J. A. Baker\u2019s \u2018The Peregrine\u2019 in Fall<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"An autumn with J. A. Baker.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s The Peregrine in Fall by Barret Baumgart\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 22, 2017 \u2013 Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft.   It was autumn and warm, late evening, and the\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-09-22T13:01:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-09-22T17:40:14+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"720\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Barret Baumgart\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Barret Baumgart\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"12 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Barret Baumgart\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ce23ba3fe236729953e161e2628b363a\"},\"headline\":\"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s The Peregrine in Fall\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-09-22T13:01:03+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-09-22T17:40:14+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/\"},\"wordCount\":2358,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"autumn\",\"birds\",\"corn\",\"Ekstasis\",\"hawks\",\"Iowa\",\"J. A. Baker\",\"landscape\",\"library\",\"naturalism\",\"nature\",\"oddity of man\",\"Pesticides\",\"Rachel Carson\",\"Rings of Saturn\",\"Silent Spring\",\"The Hill of Summer\",\"The Peregrine\",\"W. G. Sebald\",\"Werner Herzog\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Stolen\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/\",\"name\":\"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s \u2018The Peregrine\u2019 in Fall\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-09-22T13:01:03+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-09-22T17:40:14+00:00\",\"description\":\"An autumn with J. A. Baker.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s The Peregrine in Fall\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"width\":696,\"height\":696,\"caption\":\"The Paris Review\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\",\"https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ce23ba3fe236729953e161e2628b363a\",\"name\":\"Barret Baumgart\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7501a513da8d7ba042fa56b0d29617708ca5ed3e986c719b5a757e8c0f6616cb?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7501a513da8d7ba042fa56b0d29617708ca5ed3e986c719b5a757e8c0f6616cb?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Barret Baumgart\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/barretbaumgart\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s \u2018The Peregrine\u2019 in Fall","description":"An autumn with J. A. Baker.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s The Peregrine in Fall by Barret Baumgart","og_description":"September 22, 2017 \u2013 Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft.   It was autumn and warm, late evening, and the","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2017-09-22T13:01:03+00:00","article_modified_time":"2017-09-22T17:40:14+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1000,"height":720,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Barret Baumgart","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Barret Baumgart","Est. reading time":"12 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/"},"author":{"name":"Barret Baumgart","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ce23ba3fe236729953e161e2628b363a"},"headline":"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s The Peregrine in Fall","datePublished":"2017-09-22T13:01:03+00:00","dateModified":"2017-09-22T17:40:14+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/"},"wordCount":2358,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg","keywords":["autumn","birds","corn","Ekstasis","hawks","Iowa","J. A. Baker","landscape","library","naturalism","nature","oddity of man","Pesticides","Rachel Carson","Rings of Saturn","Silent Spring","The Hill of Summer","The Peregrine","W. G. Sebald","Werner Herzog"],"articleSection":["Stolen"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/","name":"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s \u2018The Peregrine\u2019 in Fall","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg","datePublished":"2017-09-22T13:01:03+00:00","dateModified":"2017-09-22T17:40:14+00:00","description":"An autumn with J. A. Baker.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/my-house-of-sky-cover-copy.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/22\/reading-j-a-bakers-the-peregrine-in-fall\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Reading J. A. Baker\u2019s The Peregrine in Fall"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization","name":"The Paris Review","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","width":696,"height":696,"caption":"The Paris Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ce23ba3fe236729953e161e2628b363a","name":"Barret Baumgart","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7501a513da8d7ba042fa56b0d29617708ca5ed3e986c719b5a757e8c0f6616cb?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/7501a513da8d7ba042fa56b0d29617708ca5ed3e986c719b5a757e8c0f6616cb?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Barret Baumgart"},"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/barretbaumgart\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1255"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115860"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115934,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115860\/revisions\/115934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}