Toward a Catalogue of Falling

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

This excellent collection of poems offers a selection of interpretations
of the word “falling.”

One can fall in so many different ways. For example, one can “fall in
love asleep downstairs” (“Diptych I”); or fall from grace (a
descent symbolized in the story of Adam and Eve); or fall from the sky
(failure as symbolized in the mythological legend of Icarus, which has
inspired painters and poets for two millennia). And behind all of the
meanings of the word lies the idea of “the fall,” that moment in the
lives of individuals, institutions, and entire civilizations when a
change—which inevitably contains decline—begins.

This is mature poetry that teases one into thought.