Domain of Perfect Affection (review)

In her 1947 essay "The Heart and the Lyre," Louise Bogan urged "women poets" not to neglect passion in their poetry. "Even the greatly gifted Elizabeth Bishop," she wrote, "places emphasis more upon anecdote than upon ardor." The advice is still fresh. Robert Pinsky has emphasized the value of "making distinctions without sacrificing passion" to young poets who may prefer a vague opacity allowing them to "avoid the risk of clumsiness by saying little." Obscure coolness may usurp the entire range of tones as a result. Apparently passion demands a certain creative management that discomfits poets, tests their talents, and forces the issue: Do I dare speak out? On the other hand, the presence of a dedicated passion may not suffice. A certain spiritual ardor, as heard in recent poetry by Jane Hirshfield and Tess Gallagher, may be notable for its mystical leavening, though in some ears the Zen dilutes the zest.

For thirty years, Robin Becker has been tracking a passion for something not fully manifest except in moments of uttering its name: perfect affection. Her tones may change dramatically from page to page. This is why with Becker, there are her poems, and then there are her books. She may voice a muted resentment, and a few pages later she may speak of transcendence. Among the caucuses of identity poetics, Becker is celebrated as a poetic triple-threat: feminist, Jewish, lesbian. Her work is noted for its receptivity to the personal, an affectionate attention to the animal world, a long itinerary of locations, and engrossing uses of art and art history. The individual poems reveal her mastery of description, or irony, or form of address, or her unhesitant voicing of endearments, drifting states of mind, crisp assessments, and prickly or pleasant memory. But her books are built on a classic theme: the struggle to sustain the tension of a private, inner life. The intensity of the struggle is evident in the divergent strategies she has developed for managing the passionate. The poems deviate from a tense center-even the assertive, cherishing poems. If Becker has never abandoned the potential of anecdote, she has increasingly supplemented it over the years with a search for ominous forces underlying the memories or moments of close encounters with others. So, you may discover in her previous book, The Horse Fair (2000), "how people are marginalized because of gender," as one critic put it. But Becker tells us more broadly that "marginalization" results from even the smallest departures from the conventional, namely any perception that requires fresh phrasing to describe it. Becker's desirous eye more typically settles on a shimmering fact in a defining moment.

Becker's passion first appeared as an urge to sustain contact with, and often provoke, those who live within her circle. Many of her poems are addressed to specific individuals (or dogs); the "you" is rarely rhetorical. Anecdote spiked with telling detail acting as its own commentary: this was the basic setup in Backtalk (1982), Giacometti's Dog (1990), and All-American Girl (1996). In The Horse Fair, Becker enacted a more taut and groping passion. There, the multiplicity of voices, subjects, and forms cast about for undiscovered ways of embodying the inner life. The Jewishness unfolded with its traditional uncertainties: explicit spiritual values coupled to (and sometimes grating on) an understated self-revelation. Becker's so-called affirmative poems, often finishing with a note of thanks or adoration, have a habit of blocking speculation and diluting the complex, as if she must always have the final word when it comes to emotional gratification. So, I have always been partial to Becker's more restrained tones where the passion creates difficulties for itself that trigger tension and interest, not to mention a pressure that spills out in startling observation. Louis Simpson said that "the poet's theme is his true self. It is to be differentiated from the merely personal life." Becker works best when she tempts us with the personal, then entices us to speculation that dissolves in an ominous space.

Now comes Domain...