Tiger Heron

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.

"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.'

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.

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.

Grief and loss punctuate 'Tiger Heron', but through this dizzying emotional landscape, Becker's technical prowess dazzles.

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.

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.