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Following the thread of her sexual identity through a web of memory and history, Robin Becker tangles with questions of lesbianism, Jewishness, and relationships in her third book of poems, All-American Girl, winner of a 1997 Lambda Award. In the process she holds up Peter Pan as a drag idol, contra dances with farm wives in Robert Frost's New Hampshire, celebrates Yom Kippur in New Mexico, and mourns her sister over roast chicken. To Becker, the "innocence" of the 1950s becomes a lens with which to view her own lessons of experience.
Becker's dominant role is the exuberant observer, the all-American girl of the title. In "Too Jewish" she defends her choice not to get a nose job, while remembering her sister's eagerness to "march/ before the knife, the gleam of good marriages/ in her prescient eye./ My sister only wanted a date," as if one "could fix a problem/ by cutting it away." At other times in the book, her poems consider their subjects with a distanced and ironic sensibility reminiscent of W.H. Auden, as in her poem "Solar," in which a speaker meditates on the sexual identity of a landscape:
The desert is butch, she dismisses your illusions
about what you might do to make your life
work better, she stares you down and doesn't say
a word about your past. She brings you a thousand days,
a thousand suns effortlessly each morning rising.
She lets you think what you want all afternoon.
These are her best poems. They achieve a wonderful sense of negative capability, considering multiple viewpoints without grasping for the easy observation. Nothing is cheap in Becker's poetry, not even the dimestore lipstick in "Dreaming At The Rexall Drug," where the speaker finds, in the memory of watching her grandmother shop for makeup in 1955, a reason to lament her own mortality: "as far as I know, everyone will live forever." Becker, an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, revels in exposing kitsch as the skeletal structure of modern memory, and puts a lively sense of prosody at her service.
From Publishers Weekly
In her third collection, Becker (Giacometti's Dog) presents a washed out, chiaroscuro portrait of the lonely woman, whose lover "...is beautiful and/ sees beauty where I see sadness..." Readers, too, may search for moments of beauty, but Becker holds them at bay. These poems focus on the lesbian trying to fake it in a heterosexual milieu, the suicide's sister, the traveler hoping to fit in somewhere?from the 1950s Philadelphia of her childhood, Italy, France, New Mexico, Wyoming. Ultimately, this volume is more about leaving than loving; the speaker of the final poem considers "how my life has been a flight/ from family, and how I've arrived/ at middle age without one." The poems are intense, and a few ("Port-Au-Prince, 1960" and "The Ribbon") are stirring, but too many focus on similar events from similar emotional perspectives, leaving readers ultimately unmoved.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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