Giacometti's Dog (Pitt Poetry) [Hardcover]

Robin Becker (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pitt Poetry | Publication Date: June 1990

Celebratory or eligiac, these poems record the author’s “two-headed journey” to root herself - geographically and emotionally - in the world.  Becker’s poems are from remote and familiar outposts: the watery evanescence of Venice contrasts with the desert of the American Southwest; we lean with her over the rim of a canyon or stand back to study a  Giacometti sculpture.  From such settings arise poems on the death of a sibling, the consoling power of painting and sculpture; others celebrate the erotic and the capacity of the female body for pleasure and pain.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With a direct, unembellished narrative style, a voice at once reserved and passionate, Becker ( Backtalk ) uses shifting geographical and emotional landscapes to consider the complexities of love, loss and relationships. Throughout the collection, the coffey/if you can say narrator when talking of poems, please switch this to narrator/speak used below/pk speakerspeaker? persona? attempts to come to terms with the ghosts of friends and family members who haunt these pages; she seeks to "learn the patience to live / alongside the dead who will not speak / and will not go away." For Becker, though the earth is "a lonely place, miles from anywhere," consolation can be found in art, nature, human sexuality and "faithfulness renewing itself / with each attention to one thing, and the next." She is at her best when using microscopic detail and apt particulars to magnify past and present moments and events, her poems quietly building to subtle, arresting epiphanies. But the book is uneven, as Becker's language and rhythms sometimes slacken, lapsing into the vague and prosaic.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

The Accident
The Bath
Birch Trees
Bodies We Will Never Know
Built On Water
Chagall
The Children Of Siran Darda
The Children's Concert
The Compassionate Friend
Conversations In July
Decoupage
Fable
The First Summer Of The Word Processor
Floating Farm
Giacometti's Dog
Good Boy
Grief
The Hand-carved Chairs
Hiking Gold Hill Ridge
In Pompano Beach, Florida
Incarnate
Jazz Festival, France
Letter From Your Father
Like Breath At Your Ear
Living In The Barn
The Lover Of Fruit Trees
A Marriage
Matisse
Medical Science
On Vashon
Osteoporosis
Philadelphia, 1955
Prelude
The Problem Of Magnification
The Return
Riding Lesson
Rome Of The Imagination
The Round Barn
Sadness In Spring
Selective Memory
Still Life
The Story I Like To Tell
The Subject Of Our Lives
Susan Longmire: The 1891 Ascent Of Mt. Rainier
The Taj Express
Tantric Pictures
Tether
The White Place
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Hardcover: 59 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press (June 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822936364
• ISBN-13: 978-0822936367
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,762,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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