Today's poem is "Dog Person"
from Tiger Heron
Robin Becker
, Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, is the author of seven poetry collections, including Domain of Perfect Affection, The Horse Fair, Giacometti’s Dog, and All-American Girl, winner of the Lambda Literary Award. In 2002 the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh published Venetian Blue, a limited-edition chapbook of Becker’s art poems. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 she received the George W. Atherton III Award for Excellence in Teaching from Penn State, and from 2010 to 2011 she served as the Penn State Laureate. For the Women’s Review of Books, Becker edits poetry and writes a column on poetry called “Field Notes.”
Other poems by Robin Becker in Verse Daily:
Books by Robin Becker:
Other poems on the web by Robin Becker:
Robin Becker According to Wikipedia.
About Tiger Heron:
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
January 21, 2004: "With Two Camels and One Donkey" "May we walk into our lives as into a watercolor..."
Six poems
Five poems
Three poems
"Xenia"
"Life Forms"
"In the Days of Awe"
Maxine Kumin
Ellen Bass
Alison Bechdel
Sarah Koenig
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