On Sunday Afternoons by Richard Becker

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 Levine

Of “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