Something strange is going on in the beginning of Theories of Falling, Sandra Beasley’s first book of poetry. The strangeness is not in the poems themselves, but in the worldview that’s presented to the reader, a twist to your vision that makes the modest malevolent. Cherry tomatoes, Christmas trees, and mothers – aspects of life which we are either supposed to find innocuous at worst, cheerful and loving at best – all are turned against us. The tomatoes become small bags filled with blood. The tree is a monster. The mothers aren’t monsters, but something worse: they are people behaving like monsters. At least the monsters have an excuse.
This world is presented through the eyes of a child who is both being taught how to perceive the world by her family, and who looks back as an adult as a witness to how these lessons in perspective have betrayed her adulthood. For the speaker, nothing is as it seems, and nothing, finally, in her world, relates to how others describe the world as being. This prepares us for “Allergy Girl”, a long sequence that recounts the life of the speaker, a girl whose allergies make the world a dangerous place. And the world is dangerous not just because of her allergies, but because of the inability for others in the world to recognize her allergies. The parents try to calm the child down with food that simply makes her more irritable. They wonder why she won’t eat, and make delicacies to tempt her with poison instead. A disbelieving boyfriend tricks her with a kiss, his mouth full of chocolate; an ex insures against physical contact by eating cheese before a reunion.
This section – the first of three, titled “The Experiment” – embodies a world of deception, where things don’t shift form, they shift interpretation. The poems here show a mastery of metaphorical narrative, all the poems fitting together tightly towards a single goal even though the poems themselves tackle widely varying subjects. Beasley’s sure hand at construction means you might not realize what you’re missing until you hit the second section, “Theories of Falling,” and find yourself shuddering to the language in a way the poems in the first section only hint at. Here are the first two stanzas from “Cherry Tomatoes”, the poem that opens the book:
Little bastards of vine.
Little demons by the pint.
Red eggs that never hatch,
just collapse and rot. When
my mom told me to gather
their grubby bodies
into my skirt, I’d cry. You
and your father, she’d chide—
Compare that with these lines from “You”, the poem opening the second section:
You are the whole building on fire.
You are the voice of sirens. You are
the dumb crowd milling, the capture
of Weegee’s lens. You are flames
licking up the escape. You’re the hovering
of a mother at the cliff of her window ledge.
You are the choice to drop her baby.
Theories of Falling is a slow-starter, but once you lose yourself in Beasley’s language it carries you through to the end. For me, that tipping point was the poem above. The voice is secure in itself and calls you to listen, a different sort of siren, and one that, like the siren the poem alludes to, is a dangerous fascination. The poems after “You” are just as strong, and the book builds from this point onward – not in subject, but in emotion and theme. The book grows into a dark cloud. One with a silver lining, perhaps, but a dark cloud all the same. Some hypnotizing openings from this section: “This light is heavy. This light is a slab” (“American Thing”); “These woods teem with runaway brides” (“The Birches”); “I read the note. I crush the fly. I spin the chair. I sit up,/I sit down. I drink the wine. I am crowded with you” (“The Field”).
And then I step into the third section – “This Silver Body” – and along comes a poem like “The Angels” to knock me from my reverie. It’s then I realize that each section in this book has a different focus. I mean that in terms of subject, yes, but not just subject: each section also approaches the act of the poem differently. The middle section deals with a voice secure in its power to entrance. This is the voice that tells you what you are feeling and explains to you what it is you’re doing. The voice in the first section is that of memory, of explanation, of making sense of things past. What the third section is accomplishing through the poem is the most elusive for me. In some way, it’s a mix of both the first and the second, the declaration and the exploration. However, the tone in these latter poems is more distant and often at a cold remove, as though, if we had a telescope powerful enough, we were watching the doings of aliens on a far planet.
But perhaps this is the wrong way to think about it (and I don’t just mean the metaphor). A clearer division of the sections might be a movement from the biographical to the sociological. “The Experiment” deals with the poet, or at least a speaker concerned with itself. “Theories of Falling” concerns a relationship, even that as simple and generic as the speaker with the you, a dialogue. “This Silver Body” broadens into a more political realm, not in the common sense – though the poems here do address the current war and the responsibility of those in charge of causing it – but in that they are about people in general. The poems serve as a mirror in which to view ourselves and our culture, rather than an echo chamber for the poet.
This focus is clear in poems such as “The Angels” and “The General”, both of which don’t involve the poet at all, no “I” through which we can pinpoint an “eye”. Even those poems where the poet takes a role, such as “The Puritans”, puts the action in the poem as communal rather than individual. Talking about the sun during an eclipse, the speaker decides
That must be the fist of God, I think.
I can’t place His forearm. Class,
inside now. Could the punch
be coming straight at us?
And even a poem like “My Los Alamos” that is all “I” is abstracted to the point where it becomes a metaphor for relationships overall. Here’s a sampling:
My chute for your ladder,
My coyote for your anvil,
My Chevy for your Mustang,
My Nancy for your Sherlock.
What’s happening here is both an analogy, a comparison, and an offer of trade. My chute is equivalent to your ladder (i.e., One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.) and/or I have a Chevy, you have a Mustang and/or Will you take my Nancy for your Sherlock. And there’s one last way of looking at those individual lines: as an explanation of two different ways of living (coyote optimism versus anvil depression). All of this is to say that what “My Los Alamos” provides is a blueprint for social interaction, each line providing a guide towards understanding and living in a world filled with people who are not you.
I admit, this poem does turn towards the personal at the end.
My hand for your forgiveness.
My hand for your forgiveness,
My hand for your forgetting,
My first date for your Dairy Queen,
My thinking a fist could forget.
But even here, the poem resists an easy reduction to the purely personal and self-contained. For one, the last line dances back to the poem beginning the section, “The Puritans”, and the fist the speaker thought could forget suddenly expands again into the fist of God and the threat of another divine reckoning. And even if you stay within the poem, the title pushes away the personal and calls us all to account for “My Los Alamos” and our innate human nature that allowed the atom bomb and all its children.
Beasley is a versatile poet, and the poems in Theories of Falling plumb her capabilities well. I’m most drawn to the declarative voice in the second and third sections but, as the blurbs on the back prove, others are equally drawn, if not more so, to the first section and the “Allergy Girl” sequence. In recommending this book, I am aware how poetry is still in the album stage, and if this were a band’s new release I could recommend what songs to download. But the truth is that there are enough poems here to make it worth your while to make room on your bookshelf. Those poems that speak to you will be richer for being surrounded by other poems which simply provide you with context. And those poems that speak to you will whisper in your ear for days.
