A Journey Through Want

It feels appropriate that Blas Falconer's debut collection, populated with travelers and journeys, opens with a departure. The reader enters a stagnant landscape where horses walk "in figure eights" and the very morning is "dark and tired." She finds, unexpectedly, that she too inhabits this place, when Falconer uses the second person ("you") to place her at the center of the poem: "You shuffled on. You took what you could carry." She does not yet know where she is—what year, what country, what mental state—but already she is traveling. Her pace, a shuffle, shows her own stagnation, but her baggage, only what she can carry, shows her ability to make a clean break. She boards a ferry set to depart at 6 AM, weighing the scant knowledge she has—all based on her own questionable perception or reportage:

… You thought
you saw the lights. They had said, Blue houses on
the mountainside. They had said, On every roof, tins to catch
the rain. You thought the boat would take you there.

Though she has some idea of what she will find, she does not know that this boat will necessarily "take her there." Leaving the darkened landscape, uncertain of what she can see, of what she will see when she arrives, hers is a "question of light"; the pull between her departure point and destination becomes a "question of gravity." The poem introduces the book's travel motif, and it sets up the tension between destinations and the places left behind. Its title, "Dead Reckoning," a process of determining destination based on current coordinates, hints at a strategy for the collection as a whole. But perhaps most important, the poem compels the reader to be an actor in the journey rather than the acted-upon. If the reader accepts the challenge of this opening poem, she agrees she will not sit passively by, but will strain her eyes into the half-light, recall what she has been told, and travel alongside Falconer in a process of inquiry into the poles of lightness and weight.

The book is replete with literal travel—boats, planes, cars—and travelers—birds, lovers, and families who live at great distances. Several of the poems take place in Puerto Rico, and a recurring title, "Letter from the Cumberland," indicates at least one other definite setting. As Elizabeth Bishop demonstrated, questions of travel inevitably become questions of home, and Falconer's poems confirm this in the way they circle around the people and places that have been left behind. A glance through the table of contents, which is populated with titles such as "Lament," "Absence," "Never," "Elegy," "Autopsy," "Want," and "Prayer," signals that the journeys in this collection may ultimately be more psychic than physical, its settings more emotional than habitable.

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