In his 1960 collection The Maker, Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges presented a parable about an artist who wishes to depict everything he sees in the world. On a single wall, the artist paints stars, horses, kingdoms, deserts, people, mountains, plants, and oceans, and by the end of his life, the wall is completely filled. He steps back to look at his piece and realizes that what he has painted are the lineaments of his own face.
For those who read Robin Becker’s summative Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, everything that characterizes the poet is similarly visible. The pattern of Becker’s preoccupations shapes the entire collection, though it’s iterated in a myriad ways, and no conclusion is final. The forms she uses and shapes to her purpose are a pleasure in themselves – the sonnet, the sestet, the villanelle, couplets and triplets, written in a range of tones.
Becker is fond of facts – a painting is “6.5 x 8 inches,“ a tailor “outfitted Gene Autry and Roy Rodgers” – and she incorporates them not in opposition to imagination, but as a stimulus of it. She has not lost her sense of the world as a place of wonder, or forgotten the power of words to enchant. Even the names of the Scottish dances she enumerates are evocative.
One cluster of poems is about the rhythms and dis/comforts of everyday middle-class life – the gendered clothes, the abrupt father, the horse-riding, the education – though the perspective widens when the “l” of the poem, on a cruise ship holiday, records her loss of innocence, admitting “I know that I have something another child needs.”
The idea of family is prominent in several poems, its closeness and alienation, silences and screams, violence and tenderness, and ultimately, a mutual forgiveness “in compassion’s arms.” The ghost of a dead sister haunts the collection as Becker questions herself, and ponders guilt, blame, loss and a companionship that might have been.
In “Philadelphia 1955” the child persona encounters, through naming everyone and everything around her while a nocturnal crisis envelops the home, her own separate self, in “wild and tentative solitude, so new/ so graceless.” That moment of being is at the root of her strength: it is what enables her later to push out into the world, carrying her mother’s tender cuttings and training them to become hardy plants, capable of endurance.
Set free, or at least on a longer leash, the poet meets and loves cities, books, landscapes, Durer, Monet, Klee, Italy, erotic encounters with women, and Bach, as well as a variety of dogs, from the starved elegance of a Giacometti canine, to the dog she took from a rescue center after she was moved by its despair. In “Xenia” a dog belonging to a former lover comes to her, trusting her to offer refuge in its final days. Becker knows her place in the hierarchy of the pack: in “OK Tucker” she concedes defeat, “I was her woman, but you were her dog.” In dreams, a dog lost to time runs beside her again.
Lovers and friends inhabit the poems as Becker recalls numerous encounters, fruitful and evanescent, telling stories in a boat on a lake; flirting with a delivery driver; evoking a hotel in sunlit Tuscany; the affirmative passion of two women in a sheltering field; the acknowledgment and melancholy when a love affair has run its course. She pays tribute to other poets, especially Maxine Kumin, and acknowledges the simple decency of the men who befriend her.
Allusions to other writers can be found but are not labored. Gertrude Stein is remembered. A phrase from an Andrew Marvell poem provides a title. Becker offers a variation on Eliot’s “April is the cruelest month,” suggesting that March- May is the season of “rain and kindness.” Mallarmé’s “Le chair est triste, hélas ! / Et j’ai lu tous les livres” is obliquely interrogated in “Against Pleasure.” At times the poet breaks into exuberance. The exclamation marks and rapturous encomium of “The Barcelona Inside Me,” as the poet rejoices in the sensual extravagances of Gaudi, are reminiscent of Lorca’s love poems to Andalusia, though more concerned with craftsmanship, and working class access, than with the Spanish poet’s encomiums in Gypsey Ballads.
Becker’s acknowledgement of her Jewishness runs through the collection in a manner largely peripheral, but at times more fully embraced. Initially, it’s a matter of feeling different, not quite accepted by Protestant girls. She and a Jewish classmate, allies by circumstance, are always “picked last,” though she silently asserts that the Old Testament has better stories than the New. She finds traces of the Sephardic Conversos in New Mexico. Her long poem on Rosa Bonheur, androgynous painter of horses, notes that they “said I was a Jew…And called me Rosa Mazel-Tov.”
She approaches the topic more closely through warm vignettes of her grandmother, and in “The Sounds of Yiddish” collects phrases emblematic of a people who offer a wry shrug as they cope with the unpredictable, yet again. Becker takes to heart her father’s belief hat a Jew “can outwit fate by owning land,” and the recurrent image of oranges being grown in a desert makes her “irrigate, irrigate, irrigate.” But where this latent cultural heritage really blossoms is in the lengthy and perhaps most emotionally powerful poem in the collection, “In the Days of Awe,” in which the speaker, who has wrestled with the issue of motherhood, a state desired not so much by her, as by a beloved former partner, accepts the joy and the necessity of perpetuating life, though it means her own exclusion.
Becker reaches here for the ancient vocabulary of Judaism, as befitting the gravity, and primal nature, of birth-giving. In “Amidah,” the fundamental prayer of blessing, her petition is “that I may find a way back through love.” She beseeches “teach me to withhold judgment/ of the one who took my place who said yes when I said no.” In the poem “Shofar,” named after the horn of summoning used on Yom Kippur, Becker invites the speaker to consider her refusal, and her loss. “Tashlikh”, the ceremony of purging by water, is an invitation to cast away resentment. “Aleinu” speaks of hope for the rectification of the world in fruitfulness and wisdom. In the synagogue, as the congregation praises all things living and reproducing, the speaker watches a mother and daughter lean into one another, sharing a prayer book, “their mouth shapes the beautiful / Hebrew I do not know how to read except in transliteration.” “Teshuvah” takes us to the place of healing. The remaining seven sections of the poem journey through self-interrogation, mourning, mystery, regret and at last affirmation: “Bind me to these friends and this child…Sanctify difference and refusal bless/ the lesbians the child with two mothers”.
Midsummer Count is the evidence of a life fully lived, and honestly inscribed.
