![]() It’s a spectacularly ambitious game as well, having been created by one-man development team Tomas Sala, offering a really gorgeous 3D world to explore.Īt its core, The Falconeer is an air combat game, flipping Star Fox’s concept of animalised pilots in man-made aircraft on its head by putting human pilots on living and breathing giant birds. Soaring across the sea on a giant eagle like some sort of gun-toting Gandalf, the game looks to fulfil those flights of fancy that have long preoccupied humanity, of growing wings and taking to the sky. And yet the metaphor, now fully unmasked, remains imaginatively intact and potent to the end.It’s easy to be drawn in by the concept of The Falconeer. Perhaps a certain clarity about what was wrong with the relationship dawns in the swift summing up, “I’m drenched / My glove is wrong.” It leads to a particularly clinching denial in the last line, “And you are not a falcon”. But it’s the shift to direct address, seven lines from the end (“Please come back to me”) that introduces a new, more nakedly vulnerable tone, and ensures the integrity of the whole structure. ![]() No reader could doubt at any point in the monologue the pitch of the anxiety and the strength of the desperation. It works well, heightening the sensation of tumult as the lines interrupt each other, and adding a visual dimension to what is left uncompleted in the speaker’s thoughts. The poem’s rhythms are informal, so the use of a capital letter to begin each line is an unexpectedly traditional device. When the antics of the non-falconer make us imagine an arm-waving supplicant in school, we’re quickly redirected: “I lift my fist higher / If my arm gets tired I’ll switch arms / Miss, miss! / Like I’m asking God a question.” This female God and the falcon seem almost to merge identities. The “Fedex” quip seems one of those moments where the humour, though it might play to an audience, can be taken as an attempt at self-soothing. The jarring of geographical perspective in “She could be literally anywhere / Penzance /India’” seems nicely self-mocking while it illustrates how anxiety feeds on itself and explodes. The first anxious question-to-self breaks in revealingly early, and its answer isn’t encouraging: “Should I whistle? / I can’t whistle”.Īs the voice of desperation grows (though it has never been absent), the speaker’s jokes seem to become more complex, and to change character. ![]() The speaker is soon shown to be ill-equipped, with a hopelessly unsuitable “woolly glove” to lure the falcon down. “I am standing in this field / Holding my glove in the air” seems a vague, distracted portrait of what a falconer does. Despite the robust denial in the poem’s title, there’s no doubt of the speaker’s attempt to make a success of being a falconer.įailure is registered from its beginning. The protagonist takes on a role for which they are unqualified, and is gradually revealed to be hilariously out of their depth. The poem’s plot owes something to the tradition of a certain kind of farce. In Bird’s poem, comedy and desperation are more thoroughly integrated. It makes an interesting comparison read alongside Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, where humour and the claim to “cool” almost succeed in holding a dreadful knowledge at bay. ![]() From Caroline Bird’s Selected Poems: Rookie, I Am Not A Falconer is a love poem focused on revealing the impact of its loss. ![]()
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