Domain of Perfect Affection (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Becker, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822959313 ISBN 13: 9780822959311

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Synopsis

In Domain of Perfect Affection, Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist pleasure: in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard, or museum; New York or New Mexico. “The Mosaic injunction against / the graven image” inspires meditations on drawings by D_rer, Evans, Klee, Marin, and del Sarto. To the consolations of art and human intimacy, Becker brings playfulness—“Worry stole the kayaks and soured the milk”—suffused with self-knowledge: “Worry wraps her long legs / around me, promises to be mine forever.” In “The New Egypt,” the narrator mines her family’s legacy: “From my father I learned the dignity / of exile and the fire of acquisition, / not to live in places lightly, but to plant / the self like an orange tree in the desert.” Becker’s shapely stanzas—couplets, tercets, quatrains, pantoum, sonnet, syllabics—subvert her colloquial diction, creating a seamless merging of subject and form. Luminous, sensual, these poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.

About this title

About the Author

Robin Becker received the Lambda Award in Poetry for All-American Girl and has held fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. Her books include Tiger Heron, Domain of Perfect Affection, The Horse Fair, and Giacometti’s Dog. Professor Emeritus of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State, Becker serves as poetry and contributing editor for the Women’s Review of Books.

From the Back Cover

"Robin Becker achieves what may be one of the early twenty first century's most difficult accomplishments-to write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn't pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences, regularly demonstrating her kind of perfect affection: 'Come up for the lunch I made you, / O handy lover, with your retractable blade, / your small drill, your paint brushes bristling.'" --Stephen Dunn

"A deft painter of scenes and lives, Robin Becker follows a thread of comedy in the dark labyrinth of the family saga. We could call that thread compassion. We could call it wisdom. Becker is an afficionado of old and odd paintings, of summer and seashore, of friends, lovers, and autumn heat, of whatever may 'disappoint and delight.' She is a lover of life and language-stubborn as they come. Domain of Perfect Affection is a poet in her prime." --Alicia Suskin Ostriker

"In Domain of Perfect Affection, Robin Becker has again written poetry that, in Wordsworth's phrase, 'is carried alive into the heart by passion.' She bears forth her father's wisdom, 'The most important thing: / to love your work,' and in poem after poem that love is obvious: 'How many words for glisten, sparkle, glister?' Yet her passion for language spells a deeper passion to 'inhabit / a place of such tenderness' where the poet might 'accept myself / for what I am-androgynous, sublime.' Line by line, these poems create such a place, a domain where celebrations 'of our communal selves, / sheared of the theoretical,' quicken our lives, endowing us with 'the dignity / of exile.' In poems of startling clarity and intensity, in poems of-yes!-androgynous sublimity, Robin Becker reveals herself to be one of our most generous and essential poets." --Michael Waters

Praise for The Horse Fair: "This generous poet is never less than attentive and responsive to the world that surrounds her." --Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times Book Review

"Becker's painstaking, emphatic use of language celebrates a patient yet intrepid dedication to art as well as the indomitable spirit of life, human or otherwise, in the face of oppression and death." --Floyd Collins, West Branch

Reviews

The sixth full-length from the still-underrated Becker (The Horse Fair, 2000) uses sustained attention and deceptively quiet language to delve skillfully into familiar topics: Jewish heritage, lesbian culture, generational succession, and the ambivalent legacy of the Sixties. Describing her path from a radical youth to middleage , Becker's verse remains careful and clear, much like Philip Levine's in its sense of how poems ought to work (and Becker is at least as good a technician). Domestic objects and incidents-the obsolete laundry gadget called a mangle, the contents of a disused drawer-provide subjects and reasons for recollection: outsider artists (such as Donald Evans, who drew imaginary stamps) give her reason for elegiac praise. Becker's few forays into closed forms (a pantoun, for example) display all the craft they require, never turning away from their subjects. Her free verse lines can grow pleasantly prickly, or even grim: "Against Pleasure" warns beachgoers about "jellyfish for the rest of the summer/ and the ozone layer full of holes." Celebrations of amity and of erotic love counterpoint such sad reminders: a poem about a grand flood projects "a waterproof optimism, hoping to run into a few friends/ who'd taken the rain into their own hands and gone pelagic."
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822959313
• ISBN 13: 9780822959311
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88