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The Horse Fair
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by Robin Becker
University of Pittsburgh Press
Due/Published
April 2000, 96 pages,
paper
ISBN
0822957205
These poems are really portraits of people who, though marginalized by society because of gender, religion, and sexual preference, negotiate public and private spheres while inventing sustainable communities. She begins with the 19th century painter Rosa Bonheur. Becker's title, The Horse Fair, takes its name from Bonheur's painting and serves as the vehicle through with Becker explores anti-smitism, cross-dressing, and bonheur's lifelong relationships with women. Becker also, for example, speaks from the persona of Charlotte Salomon, a child of assimilated German-Jewish paraents, who died in Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six. The Horse Fair is a moving, soulful, fluid meditation on being a Jew as this century closes. Robin Becker is a generous, compassionate, incisive guide through mysterious and heartbreaking terrain."-Carol Maso "It's hard to know where to begin praising this collection, it contains so many virtues: unremitting, intellectual brilliance and acute historical understanding, especially about being an outsider and a survivor. I go to Robin Becker's poetry as I might go to a great novelist like George Eliot or Carol Shields-to experience the news they bring back from the world and its interpretation by a major mind."-Jonathan Holden "I treasure these redemptive poems by Robin Becker, who writes with compassion and amazing vitality about the grief, afflictions, and foibles of trees, animals, and humans
bound together on this dangerous planet. Her book is an exquisite manual on how to live."-Shirley Kaufman "Describing a woodpecker, Robin Becker writes, 'Far-flung orbit of energy . . . a restless aptitude drives her hungers . . .' She could just as well be describing her own far flung imagination, her own hungers made manifest in language. The Horse Fair is a beautifully crafted book, wise and forgiving."-Linda Pastan These narratives pay loving attention to several personal and historical tragedies. They record life with a tenderness that is easily trusted, despite forces bearing down on their subjects which would have it that their souls be obscured.
This is one soulful collection of poems."-Jane Miller "What I love in Robin Becker's poems is how much the world is with her; characters, histories, animals, places, and things crowd onto these pages, inscribing them with the cries of the living. Becker is against silence; she instructs the world, instead, to 'Harpsichord me. Entail me. Depose me' in these shapely poems marked by her curious, tender, worldly presence."-Mark Doty |
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