Domain of Perfect Affection (Pitt Poetry Series) by Robin Becker

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. ldquo;The Mosaic injunction against / the graven imagerdquo; inspires meditations on drawings by Duuml;rer, Evans, Klee, Marin, and del Sarto. To the consolations of art and human intimacy, Becker brings playfulness-ldquo;Worry stole the kayaks and soured the milkrdquo;-suffused with self-knowledge: ldquo;Worry wraps her long legs / around me, promises to be mine forever.rdquo; In ldquo;The New Egypt,rdquo; the narrator mines her familyrsquo;s legacy: ldquo;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.rdquo; Beckerrsquo;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.