Tiger Heron
by Robin Becker
University of Pittsburgh Press. 80 pages, $15.95
ROBIN BECKER is a well-established American poet and literary critic and professor at Penn State. Her eighth book, Tiger Heron, is a balanced collection of poems that tell stories and draw portraits with a clear eye and a steady hand. The recurring themes in Becker’s books—personal relationships, places, animals, and art—are back in Tiger Heron. The poems here are sincere and studious with a few controlled bursts of humor and despair and an underlying feeling of sadness and loss.
Some of the poems concern touching and being touched by the natural world, especially animals both wild and domestic. Becker’s alarm about habitat loss finds expression in the three-part poem “Elegy for the Northern Flying Squirrel.” The opening lines—“Not exactly a flier but a glider/ between trees” —inadvertently describe Becker’s own aesthetic, which is representational and responsible, accomplishing its magic in a middle realm, gliding from tree to tree, subject to subject, rather than through extreme, potentially perilous, leaps of flight. The poem precisely describes the squirrel’s habits and shrinking habitat and ends with the squirrel being sold as an “exotic pet” that “learns to come to the human/ for comfort and safety.” The appalling paradox of a wild creature seeking safety with its destroyers is not conveyed by the tone of these lines but instead by facts, images, and the radiance of Becker’s language. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “the most primitive herons are the six species of tiger herons (formerly called tiger bitterns), shy, solitary birds with cryptic, often barred, plumage.” In zoology, “cryptic” means “coloration or markings serving to camouflage an animal in its natural environment.” Becker has written elsewhere that “disguise and camouflage are familiar strategies of the oppressed.” The world’s oppressed have often been told, in one way or another, that if you want to be a [fill in the blank], okay, just keep quiet about it. Tiger Heron seems intent on creating or advocating safe habitats. But does the book also argue in favor of the relative safety of disguise and camouflage? One of my favorite poems in the book is “Dyke,” which begins: “The word came after me, then hid each time/ I turned to look at it./ It breathed in the hedge. I could hear it bite/ and snap the air.// I feared the woman with slicked-back hair/ sitting on a bar stool.” In the poem, the word “dyke” becomes flesh. This dyke, shed of her camouflage, the target of fear and hate, ultimately “led the parade/ around the city … joyful.” After observing this woman in her verbal and physical habitat, Becker ends the poem thus: “First/ I had to hate her;/ then I had to hurt her; the rest of my life, / I ate from her hand.” In “The Middle Path,” the narrator visits a neighbor “at Xmas,/ dressed as a dominatrix … my girlfriend/ sporting a tuxedo and topper.” Are they in disguise, or is this revelation? Whether exploring habitats, “secret synagogues disguised/ as apartments,” the library, the “mowing” (a field of grass grown for hay), the sea, or the tropics, Tiger Heron is in one sense a book of fields. The book begins in a field (with a poem in memory of Matthew Shepard), and ends in a field with these lines: “setting the field over the field/ to reveal the field beneath.” One of Becker’s earlier poems has this line: “I’d made a pasture of my palm, a field.” Another has this line: “Silence is a meadow.” What is the significance of “field” to Becker? I sense that, for her, the field is both the beginning of inspiration and an imagined ending, where one is free, open, and complete, where disguise is unnecessary and survival is natural. There is much to ponder in this book, and much to be commended. ________________________________________________________ Mary Meriam is the author of Conjuring My Leafy Muse (2013) and the editor of Irresistible Sonnets (2014).
