Review by Jeremy Voigt
THEORIES OF FALLING
By Sandra Beasley
New Issues Press
The College of Arts and Sciences
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI 49008
ISBN:-10:1-930974-74-4
64 pp., $14.00
http://www.wmich.edu/newissues/
Theories of Falling is a book about the body and the spirit. The wordplay in the title sets up poems that are concerned with both the spiritual fall of man and the physical pains of living. The spiritual fall works as a central metaphor (and literally in titles such as “The Puritans,” “The Angels” and “The Flood”) as the persona behind the poems probes childhood and dysfunctional adult relationships. Beasley also presents the pleasure-pain principal with tremendous energy in poems full of strong images and wit.
In the title poem Beasley meditates on the cat’s ability to turn and land on its feet:
