Books
by Maria Browning
Stranger in a Strange Land Blas Falconer
In the catalog blurb for Blas Falconer’s first collection of poems, A Question of Gravity and Light, the University of Arizona Press makes a point of saying that the Nashville poet and Austin Peay assistant English professor is “a gay man who embraces his Puerto Rican heritage.” Such flackery makes a reader’s heart sink, fearing the sort of identity lit that’s filled with resentment masquerading as creative passion. In Falconer’s case, the fear is groundless. His work is indeed rich with images of love and sex between men, and of Puerto Rico as the locale of family myth—but there’s not a hint of posturing in his work, no tantrums about the cruelty of the mainstream. Instead, Falconer uses his particular experiences of being “other”—a gay man in a hetero world, an ethnic exotic in the white South—as entry points for exploring universal feelings of displacement, exclusion and loss.
It’s dangerous to be different, and there’s an undercurrent of threat in many of these poems. Falconer’s work is varied thematically and formally, but the anxiety of being found out, pegged as alien or as potential prey, turns up all through A Question of Gravity and Light. “The Fear of Being Known,” one of the collection’s many impressionistic free verse poems, is a brief, startling portrait of a fish market where “A knife swings. The blade strikes / the cutting board, scraping heads and tails / to the floor.” The poem shifts focus from this bustling everyday violence to the tree frogs hiding nearby, terrified into silence: “Tonight they’ll sing their one song. / Till then, each is a heart, / beating too fast for its own good.” The frogs are a quirky but apt metaphor for an inner self that feels weak and voiceless in the heedless rush of the world.
A QUESTION OF GRAVITY AND LIGHT
By Blas Falconer (The University of Arizona Press, 65 pp., $15.95)“A Ride in the Rain,” by contrast, is a perfectly constructed pantoum about a “familiar man” offering the narrator a lift on a rainy night. The action is straightforward yet mysterious: perhaps it’s a simple favor being offered, perhaps a sexual pickup, perhaps a lure for a hate crime. Here again, a mundane moment contains a world of fear as the potential rider ponders ugly possibilities for the driver’s intent. “A ride in the rain? The dark clouds bellow. / Bile is a blade at the back of your throat. / The driver has no knife. He has no knife, no.”
There is, in fact, a lot of realized violence in these poems—drowning is a common theme—but the literal deaths Falconer describes are often clear symbolic references to emotional pain or an individual’s loss of authenticity. “The Vanishing Point” begins with a sickening act of brutality witnessed by two people who seem to be mother and son. “Boys carried a mutt to the end of the pier, / pushed it over the edge, / and threw stones at its head / as it struggled to shore.” The memory of this blood sport emerges many years later, when it seems to represent for the son some deep wound that he can’t adequately convey. As he confronts his mother’s silence, he remembers the drowned dog, whose fate mirrors his own hurt, which is also destined to remain submerged. “That day I thought, It’s there, / though I couldn’t see the dog— / and think of it down there still.”
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Falconer has an exceptional knack for creating images that give vivid expression to the pain of what can’t be said, especially between people who love each other. The sense of exile, both psychic and physical, is profound in these poems. The emotional distance between loved ones is reflected in, and heightened by, actual distance from anything that might be called home. Falconer’s poems of Puerto Rico express a desire to love the place that is thwarted by feelings of exclusion and alienation. In “To Know You Better” he seeks connection to his mother in the island home of her childhood. Instead he finds only the brutality of men at a cockfight, and the silent hostility of women who instinctively disapprove of what he is. “They recognize your sway in my walk, / Mother, and their heads / are heavy with disappointment.”
The grief of dislocation is expressed even more pointedly in a series of seven short verses all titled “Letter from the Cumberland,” a reference to Middle Tennessee, where Falconer now lives among “the nameless birds, gunshots at dusk.” These poems speak of a double displacement—of being simultaneously an outsider in a culturally narrow milieu, and a lover separated from his partner: “I thought, It must be cold / in Amherst now. And then, Someone has to give.”
In A Question of Gravity and Light, Falconer shows himself to be more an imagistic poet than a lyrical one. There’s not much music in these verses, and very little sweeping language. Falconer’s poems are not likely to stick in the mind for their rhythm or their finely wrought phrases. But his facility for sketching the dynamic moment gives his work real power. With this collection, he does a remarkably skillful job of exploring that space in the mind where passing sights and sounds make contact with the deeply buried self, creating a poignant depiction of a man who finds himself always a stranger in a strange land.