Both as a professor and a poet, Blas Falconer knows when to say a thing—and when not to. His newest book of intimate yet spare poetry, Rara Avis (2024, Four Way Books), which means “rare bird,”is written with the pacing of a storyteller. Moving through thresholds of the lyrical and narrative, the poems are full of an honesty that reaches felt revelations and avoids the didactic. Even when coming up against uncrossable lines of attitudes and ages, each consideration of memory meets fallacies of the self and other with empathy and healing.
Rara Avis often examines the significance of time passing foremost by changes in relationships—marriage, friendship, fatherhood, and family—with the integration of a bright, if not fractured, observable world for support. That temporal materiality, lucid with natural symbolism, blends into the storyscape as fluidly as the poems’ other devices. One of my favorites, “Ten Years Before I Met You,” meditates on the experience of being alone and young in a foreign place. The wind-pollinated catkins of cottonwood trees in spring suggest the small sublime, a sort of molting. Like most of Falconer’s poems, this one rests in subtle, internal sensuality, beat by beat:
Waiting for the bus, no one spoke
English. When it came, late and full,
it stopped, but the doors
did not open. Some nights, I stood
in the orange booth, calling out
to anyone who would answer. I grew lean
over the months, shedding what
I brought but didn’t need
until my loneliness became
beautiful, whetting a want
inside me, and when the row
of cottonwoods that lined the streets
bloomed in March, their seeds
floated through the air, a nuisance, but
like a dream.
In concert with Falconer’s past books of poetry, Rara Avis contains substrates of subconscious mirroring, pattern finding, and a rhythmic movement through life’s disharmonies that could be a philosophy in itself. “Que significa,” for example, reads as a letter. The poem uses anaphora to grasp at and plunge into one summer long ago, puzzling out the significance of desire (and more):
Then someone stopped, and we lay
in the sunlit room breathing hard. Someone must have
gotten up and walked away. Someone must have made
small talk until we could pretend it never happened.
A correspondent use of “someone” appears again, later in the poem “Before surgery, I remember”
his eyes. A calm
fell over his face,
until the place he lay
became the placehe no longer law. Now,
all day, someone
is crying andtrying not to.
Someone is crying
and trying not to.
Hazy scenes of youth offer context for poems that discuss midlife themes such as the experience of raising two adopted children, reexamining dynamics of long-standing friendships and family histories, and grieving the lost and estranged. Scenes like these speak to understand those silences:
I drove to your house, knocking on
the large door at the agreed-upon time,
but no one answered. The flamboyant trees
were in bloom, their bright red blossoms scattered on
the street, and it didn’t take long to get back
to my hotel, but I got lost. I’d never been
to that part of the city and so much had changed.
As alive with—and analytical of—lovers as much as strangers, the speaker of the confessional poems is gentle around pain without being lofty or delicate. This line appears in the middle of “Like a Prize, Like a Black Pearl”: “There was a time when I thought I could bear / anything. Now, the phone rings, and—”. This breaking away into blankness moves us through the speaker’s reckoning with both his imagination of and the reality of the past, present, and future sorrows of others. Shifting from a wish to “pluck out pain,” the poem gives way to all-too-real tears, blood loss, and corporeality. For example, “They must / move organs aside to cut away whatever can’t / be saved from my gentle father” is tangled up with similarly supine images of a friend and of the self.
Reading Rara Avis, I was also struck by lightly placed questions that serve as windows to the living engine of a poem. They are posed imaginatively, suggesting an honest wonder as well as a desire to not include the untrue. For example: “the glass bowl, too— / So small, what could / it hold?” lets the speaker sit with the reader in mutual meditation. In the poem “A faded picture of our father and,” two or three such questions appear. They are as terminating of the micro-narratives as impasses can be of relationships:
You don’t
love me anymore. You haven’t loved mein years. What could he say? The photo,
fifty years old—how did it come to bemine, our father in his green shirt,
and faintly, the face you willgrow into. What am I to do with it?
Hung often in short couplets or compact lines against the canvas of the page, the poems’ conceits have a strong core—they are sometimes dreamy but remain rooted in reality to keep from falling apart. Falconer retains an everyday vernacular, the conversational flowing into the poetic. Even his innocuous, small words can convey huge feeling. Consider how much context the short word “again” adds in “Strata”:
You don’t understand, he says again,
from the back seat of the car, my sonwho only months ago could not fall
asleep before whispering, first, somesecret in my ear.
In Falconer’s books, commutes, chores, habits, daily practices, brief conversations, and passing gestures emerge sanctified in seamless alignment with the figurative. Wherein prose we might quickly read a narrator’s thought and move on, in poetry like this, we linger to sift through the grains of human insight. Falconer has mastered a sort of formula for this, weaving cinéma vérité narratives around an ephemeral experience, with unemphasized, italicized dialogue and a standout image (a tree, landscape, photograph, painting, bowl of fruit) representing great feeling. The consecutive events of personative sentences are braided, leading to surprising voltas. And the associative leaps make sense. They allude to a multiplexity in which the speaker at once receives stimulus from the channels of mind, body, and spirit—even if wrestling with the imprecision of events in retrospect.
Through storytelling and the recounting of memory, many poems are as aware of (an imagined) future as of the past, guessing at what new legacy will be left behind by the continual forging of family and personal growth. Whether “It’s a [family] story we don’t like / to tell” or the shifting of roles and a meditation on death “In the book we are reading together,” wisdom closes its hand over sentiment. In “Long Gone,” the accuracy of a heartbreaking prediction is unquestionable:
years
from now, driving,
he might confess—Hescared me
sometimes—to his
brother, the roadending abruptly
at a field of trees
they can’t see through
With white space adding to his musicality, Falconer has a great ability to suggest, at once and in short-lined stanzas, complexes within the self and larger implications of an event. In “Fatherland” below, I feel the whirlwind of concealed emotions and the speaker’s pounding heart, but I also see the precise details of the scene as if from above:
I saw the swastika first,
White Power inked
across his back, the scene:skeletons climbed his spine
above a sea of flames. I felteach breakable bone
in my boy’s hand, he whodays before asked to live
with us forever. Idiot,my mother called me once,
because you think everyone
is good.
Political and social themes within the book arise as more intuitive, authentic, and relational than discursive or polemical. They remain aware of their flow in a dark societal current.
In shorter poems, brief, dropped lines and wavelike shapes add variety, offering a freer form for intractable subjects. These float in a sea of time, unanchored to one story. Consider the line “whatever it was I was” below, which without righteousness weighs graceful emotion and intellectual abstraction. This ruminating poem, in part, questions how many concessions and appeasements it takes—or used to take—to keep a relationship alive. Its double meanings echo the double meanings of the offense. The poem is called “Reconciliation, back then, meant”:
forgiving the offense,
whatever it was,
whatever it was I was
Reliably, charmingly accessible language gives way to complexities of love, nostalgia, aversion, guilt, and pain. Each caesura adds hidden sense and possibility, like the glance at the ego of “I get” and the snapped tension between “you might” and “never see again”:
I woke up
in the early evening to a sadness
like something I could point to, a painting
you hung on the wall, a silver bowlyou filled with coins from countries you might
never see again. I could hear the boys
playing in the next room—Now, I get
to be the bad guy, until one stopped
With these juxtapositions of silent symbols and the warmth of living bodies, the major metaphors for time seem to be covered. Rara Avis is a vulnerable and volant book, in equal measure and with concerted tenderness tracing the other while letting the self be seen. There is charity for every undercurrent of conflicted duty, cultural violence, or raw argument. The wound of memory is laid bare for the reader even when it is not spoken to a poem’s addressee. In this rare book, the reader too can find renewal in the telling.
