On Sunday Afternoons

Despite its unassuming low-key title, On Sunday Afternoons is a collection of vividly stimulating surprises-whether of natural description, emotional understanding, or bristling with tactful literary reference. What I especially admire is how in poem after poem Becker startles a reader into refreshed appreciation of what we think of as the "ordinary" world. Ordinary yes, but extraordinary too in the near-haiku glimmer and glow with which the poet animates small corners of the natural world. In one poem "Local plovers call-/ and-answered/ from the power poles;" in another "night animals' voices rise cantabile falsetto/ in mock solemnity. She cranes her neck." (That Becker is also a musician-composer enriches his poetic brew.) On Sunday Afternoons also contains longer meditations rich in human-often familial-feeling, or poems that lean into more surreal animations, or revisit a remembered Brooklyn: "washed up on the shoals of the Gowanus." Lucid and musically realized, these poems emerge from what Becker calls "This center of imagining," a place in which the "bright sky" of his own imagination is at home.-Eamon Grennan"a gorgeous collection... thoughtful, affecting, and compelling...filled with poems that are beautifully crafted, imaginative, moving."-Jeffrey LevineOf "Fates," "[there's a] dense sensual feel of language [and its] frame is kept both various yet consistent. It's really a great size and shape, like they say-delightful!"-Robert Creeley