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
"Becker has developed a collection of poems that offer a realistic
view of life, living and dying in a compassionate voice that is
calming as you page through the poems in 'Tiger Heron.'-- "Fox
Chase Review"
Animals and family are important in Becker's world. In fact,
animals are family. . . . The endearing company of our fellow
creatures is part of what makes me feel at home in Becker's poetry.
Her acceptance of natural cycles enriches the intimacy she builds.
Many of the poems in 'Tiger Heron' deal with age, aging, dying, the
deaths of parents and friends, the ongoing presence of the dead.
Yet this is by no means a gloomy book, as the motif of loss is
continually leavened by Becker's exuberant homage to appetite.--
"Womenis Review of Books"
Becker's Tiger Heron, rich with animal life from the flying
squirrel and prairie dog to inhabitants of the coral reefs of the
Caribbean, expresses outrage and grief over the ongoing destruction
of these ecosystems. A moving poem deals with homophobia, another
celebrates Yiddish, 'a mongrel, Middle High German.' These vivid,
self-confident lyrics ranging from villanelle to couplet deserve
close reading.-- "Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize winner"
Grief and loss punctuate 'Tiger Heron', but through this dizzying
emotional landscape, Becker's technical prowess dazzles.-- "Lilith
Magazine"
One of Becker's particular talents is an ability to make an anvil
of one word the rest of the poem then bends around . . . Observant
songs of history and elegy, these poems turn our faces to what we
can do with love and language, and what we can't.-- "Lambda
Literary Review"
Robin Becker looks straight at the failures of our human species,
yet never loses her compassion or reduces the complexities and
paradoxes to easy conclusions. Deftly, precisely, these poems
express their wisdom in lines that surprise and delight. They are
clear as open windows through which we see our lives.-- "Ellen
Bass, author of The Human Line"
Robin Becker's poems have the limpid clarity of an early Flemish
painting, the crisp details always fusing into a larger
illumination. Complicated loss, unsparing truth, animal grace,
small comforts--her deft and daring language yields them all up
fresh, the paint still wet.-- "Alison Bechdel, author of Fun
Home"
The surprise of this book is that the poems are actually
stories--about devotion and death and decay--but somehow they're
not sad stories. Because in all of them, Robin Becker reaches into
the shadowy corners of love and pulls out feelings I didn't even
know I wanted named. I didn't know you could sneak so much life
into poems about death.-- "Sarah Koenig, producer, This American
Life"
Today's Book of Poetry is heartened by the moments of quiet
celebrations Robin Becker finds again and again in Tiger Heron. It
is hard to deal with aging, the dead and the dying but Becker takes
it head on and renders some peace out of the harrowing process. . .
Becker knew long before the experts, long before they made it
public, luck accounts for a big slice of the pie. We are all one
second, one false move away, from a new and different life. We are
riding a narrow and precarious ledge.-- "Todayis Book of
Poetry"
Whether exploring habitats, 'secret synagogues disguised/ as
apartments, ' the library, the 'mowing' (a field of grass grown for
hay), the sea, or the tropics, 'Tiger Heron' is in one sense a book
of fields. The book begins in a field (with a poem in memory of
Matthew Shepard), and ends in a field . . . I sense that, for her,
the field is both the beginning of inspiration and an imagined
ending, where one is free, open, and complete, where disguise is
unnecessary and survival is natural. There is much to ponder in
this book, and much to be commended.-- "Gay and Lesbian Review"
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