"Sound View"
from Robin Becker's
Domain of Perfect Affection

Robin Becker:

Robin Becker, professor of English and women's studies at The Pennsylvania State University, is the author of six collections of poetry, including The Horse Fair, All-American Girl, and Giacometti's Dog. Becker is the recipient of individual fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poetry column "Field Notes" appears in the Women's Review of Books, where she serves as poetry editor. (Photo by Miriam Goodman © 2006)

About Domain of Perfect Affection:

"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 aficionado 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

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