The Domain of Perfect Affection (review)

Presented in three parts, Robin Becker’s Domain of Perfect Affection is a collection of poetry that is redolent, revealing and brave. Location, both physical and temporal, provides an architecture upon which familial influence and appreciation of nature and artare founded. Throughout the collection, we see perspective shift. In part one, parents are forefront. We enter a personal space as Ms. Becker reflects upon lessons of responsibility taught, by her now elderly, father.

I think of my father who believes a Jew can outwit fate by owning land. Slave to property now, I mow and mow, my destiny the new Egypt. From his father, the tailor, he learned not to rent, but to own; to borrow to buy.

(New Egypt, p 3)

Likewise, she recalls fondly her father at work, bestowing upon him Robin Hood qualities

My father tells the story of his life and he repeats The most important thing; to love your work. I always loved my work. I was a lucky man. This man who makes up half of who I am, this blusterer who tricked the rich, outsmarting smarter men, gave up his Army life insurance plan (not thinking of the future wife and kids) and brokered deals with two-faced rats who disappeared his cash but later overpaid for building sites.

(Man of the Year, p. 12)

Ms. Becker portrays her mother as the less heroic parent, the disciplinarian. Memories are slightly more critical and less sentimental than those she scribes for her father, yet they are sharper, funnier and more replete with edgy detail.

Acolyte at the font, my mother bends before the basin and hose where Jackie soaps her fine head, adjusting pressure and temperature. How many times has she bared her throat, her clavicle, beside the other old women?

(Salon, p. 18).

As a child of the ’50s, I, too, remember observing my mother engaged in the weekly “beauty parlor” ritual, and like Ms. Becker’s mother, playing mah-jongg in our newly finished basement with “the girls.” I exalted both activities and thought of them as magical events, rites of passage for which I yearned.

Several poems featuring religious drawings and portraits by outsider artists are contained in the second part of the collection. Here, Ms. Becker unwraps and presents us her youth-filled journey of love and sense of place. In “Angel Supporting St. Sebastian” the melding of religion with physicality is tangible—the reader can feel the smooth, white alabaster described. The interplay of faith and material is erotic and unbounded. The juxtaposition of doctrine and mortality is seductive.

Shot with arrows and left for dead, against the angel’s leg, Sebastian sinks. In time, he’ll become the patron saint of athletes and bookbinders. But for now, who wouldn’t want to be delivered into his sculpted arms of the seraph his heavenly shoulders and biceps?

(Angel Supporting St. Sebastian, p. 33)

The cadence of location is predominantly outdoors and rural, filled with barns and farms and bodies of water. The time is summer and we can feel the heat of youth and wanderlust.

Isn’t the story better embellished? Aren’t we happier wooded and beached, burnished with patina? Curved, mauved?

(Summer’s Tale, p. 47)

With a seasoned voice, the final set of poems is even more reflective, at times wistful. Some dreams have been realized, others have been immortalized only in poetry. Aging has affected friends and lovers and pets and place. In this section, many poems are written in the past tense. Subjects are sadder and more heartfelt. In “Autumn Measure” season is a metaphor for loss.

Violence done to the body to save the body: tomorrow my friend will leave the hospital without her breasts. We say at least she has her life, her work, her legs.

(Autumn Measure, p. 66)

Less conversational in form than her contemporaries (Joyce Sutphen, Alice Persons, Twyla Hanson, et. al.), but no less sentimental at this juncture in her life, Ms. Becker carefully organizes her words and constructs her sentences to capture...