Domain of Perfect Affection

by Robin Becker

Overview

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 DŸrer, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822991151
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	08/01/2006
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	275 KB

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.

Table of Contents

Contents Part I The New Egypt Holy Card Intersex The Poconos Manifest Destinies August Man of the Year Against Pleasure A Pasture of My Palm Sound View Salon Lament of the Mangle The Drawer The Dome Fire The Architect of Happiness After the Snowstorm, the Bay Borderline Part II Angel Supporting St. Sebastian Soot and Spit Qualities Boys Like Best in Girls Simple Dark Orienteer: The Childhood Drawings of William Steeple Davis, 1884–1961 Subject / Matter The Miniaturists Great Sleeps I Have Known Summer’s Tale The Dogs of Santorini Head of an Old Man Description Part III Rain Mah-Jongg Fantasia Mail Order Now Old Dog Island of Daily Life Head of an Angel Cohort The Outside Agitator Autumn Measure Lodging Late Butch-Femme Birds of Prey OK, Tucker On Friendship With Two Camels and One Donkey The Wild Heart Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Worry calcifies/ my ears against music," confides Becker (Giacometti's Dog) in a poem called "Against Pleasure," and throughout her latest work she acknowledges that life dishes out pain and joy in equal measure; it's our job to sort them out. Early poems in the collection find Becker wrestling with "the Mosaic injunction against/ graven image" in a culture saturated with the Christian vision and striking out at how Manifest Destiny destroyed Native American lives. Later she evokes "The Architect of Happiness," celebrates the art of William Steeple Davis, and carpenters a poem for a deceased friend "who loves poems about ordinary things./ For her, I'll keep my abstractions/ to a minimum." Indeed, this poem evokes less the art of carpentry than the thing built-a lake cabin and its associated memories-and throughout Becker builds solid, well-crafted poems out of everyday materials, thereby capturing life as it is lived. For readers who like poetry that "honors the poached fish and the beans,/ our communal selves sheared of the theoretical," this honest, plain-spoken collection is just the thing.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Becker builds solid, well-crafted poems out of everyday materials, therby capturing life as it is lived. For readers who like poetry that ‘honors the poached fish and the beans,/...our communal selves sheared of the theoretical,' this honest, plain-spoken collection is just the thing."
—Library Journal


“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


". . .  firmly about the business of living, about the information one must collect and process both to live from day to day and to instigate change. She creates calm and then upsets it, a stunning achievment for any poet."
—Feminist Review

“Stunning: it reveals a poet whose age and experience have mellowed her subject and tighened her craft, but never diminshed her intensity of both attention to detail and affirmation of the dark compassion it takes to ‘accept myself / for what I am—androgynous, sublime.’ Becker’s poetry is always reaching toward the unsayable, demonstrating her deft abilities to write poetry that bears forth generous and ‘homely affection.’”
—The Virginia Quarterly

“The sixth full-length [collection] from the still-underrated Becker (The Horse Fair, 2000) uses sustained attention and deceptively quiet language to delve skillfully into Jewish heritage, lesbian culture, generational succession, and the ambivalent legacy of the Sixties. Describing her path from a radical youth to middle age, 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).  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.’”
—Publishers Weekly

 

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