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 Grennana 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