Publisher's 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 Durer, 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.
