Verity

The verity Nan Becker seeks is, above all, that of feeling. When she admits early on that “there is no answer in this talking to oneself,” she underestimates her resources. For she has already seen that creatures and the places they live in can become answer and question at once and, in the space always ajar between question and answer, there can appear at any moment one of those true feelings she’s seeking. A mirror like this is fickle at best but still so much wiser than none at all. Through this series of poems, Nan Becker teaches her heart to live on just that allotment of feeling which she can come by honestly. But what feels sparse to the speaker makes a rich helping for the reader.

Robert Carnevale, Caspersen School of Graduate Studies Drew University

We need the Wordsworthian wherewithal of Nan Becker. For, in Verity, the poetry arises from states of a nearly-extinct tranquility, seeming to shore up one’s own waning capacity to focus or be still. The first poem asks “How do I know what I’ve forgotten?,” calling memory itself into question, intimating themes of Loss & Grief. A later one asks “Who isn’t finally, inadequate / to the tasks of loving?,” suggesting knowledge of—and capacities for—betrayal and forgiveness. Ultimately, her inquiries unveil the presence of an un-common Joy. Indeed, there’s nothing social about Becker’s media. Hers are water, earth, air—and the life therein: spider, horse; goldfinches, geese; all manner of flora and fish. In these highwire, last-act, High Romantic poems, such beings proliferate. As Becker invokes them, they are unto-themselves perfect. If they appear too as harbingers for humankind’s grim fate, then that’s on us. For this poet, they hazard something perhaps harder to abide. Which is to say: hope.

Jo Ann Clark, author of 1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life

In Verity by Nan Becker, faith sustains itself not with the scaffolding of certitude, but on the buoyant pressure of the carefully articulated inquiry. Hers is the hope that, through the act of interrogating existence, its conundrums and its pinpricks will unsettle us into a vision at once
estranging and satiating. The poet returns, over and over again, to a river, cinches its fluctuations, limns its marvels, anneals its edges. Each poem is a lodestar, a candid and curious oracle, an oxbow around which doubt floods and conviction unnerves and then uprights itself. These superb creations astonish, over and over again, each one as trenchant, sustaining, and discomfiting as it is possible for a poem to be. Verity is a triumph.

Tom Daley, author of Far Cry