Erasable Walls (First Book) - Softcover

Larsen, Lance

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932826601 ISBN 13: 9780932826602

Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 1998

Synopsis

Erasable Walls is a series of elegant personal meditations on the always evolving self. These beautifully crafted poems show a degree of mastery that’s rare in a first book. Though quiet and subtle, Larsen’s voice is also nervy and truth-telling, with considerable cumulative power.

About this title

About the Author

LANCE LARSEN is the author of three collections of poetry: Backyard Alchemy; (2009), In All Their Animal Brilliance; and Erasable Walls (1998). His poems have appeared in Paris Review, Shenandoah, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review and elsewhereIn 2007 he received the National Endowment for the Arts' highly prestigious Literature Fellowship in Poetry. He teaches in the English Department at Brigham Young University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Bruce Bennett, Harvard Review, Fall 1998 A measure of the quality of Erasable Walls can be taken by reading "Walking Around," which begins:

Sometimes it's loss I want, a slow acid eating my bones, wife and son gone forever, loss that would color this moon a sad yellow and give these houses voices beneath their paint.

Though impressed by the assurance of the voice and the richness of the images, we might think ourselves in the presence of romantic melancholy. But "Walking Around" is not an exercise in self-indulgence. By the end of the poem we realize the poet has established isolation and distance in order to attain a perspective that will enable him to understand more fully who he already is: a man connected to a family and community, whose stance permits him "to invent the darkness where we dream," and thereby "hear the song of our leaves" and "feel the tangle and sprawl of our roots." In light of this enterprise, it is not surprising that many poems in Erasable Walls seek to place the poet and family man firmly in his element. In "Inventing Leona," he labors, without success, to conjure up his grandmother's lost identity and daily existence by trying to milk a cow as she would have done it. "February 1922: My Father's Conception" and "A Place Like That" home in on the putative act of love that may have launched his father into being. Using ancestors, family members, people he has known, and people he imagines, Larsen questions and meditates on what Frost in "The Star-Splitter" called "our place among the infinities." One poem, "Interiors," does that literally. The poet as a teenager is minding the house of a family that is touring Greece. Infatuated by the two older sisters, "Leggy, impossible girls, tennis players, already in college," yet powerless to invoke them from their physical surroundings, he floats in the pool:

Mostly I kept to the deep end. Rain water, sprinkler water, water that had lipped at thighs-- that's what was holding me up. And above, through a kaleidescope of sycamore branches, animals I couldn't see pinned to a wheel of stars. I was at the center of something. I kept the lights off to blur my edges.

To give oneself to Erasable Walls is to feel the strangeness and wonder of being alive, a person with as name, ties, and responsibilities, sharing a destiny with others who also do not know what they are or why they are here. Yet in company with Lance Larsen it is not a heavy trip. One reason the experience is pleasurable as well as moving is that the poems are laced with dark humor. The reader continually confronts common emotions and discomfitures. Though a sense of mortality pervades Erasable Walls, mortality is usually treated as one more fact of life, and can even be comic. "Funeral Home," chronicling a class visit, opens:

Lungs--you could smell them. He held them like bloated fish, a big, slithery one leaking brown juice, the other one puffy and clean and pink. The good one is Mrs. Daley, he said, eighty-four years old. The other guy--over two packs a day, and not even forty...

And when the elegiac note is sounded directly, it is oddly consoling. "Smoke," an elegy for a loved coach, concludes:

I'll do my honors, later, at the city park. Make it dusk, or just after, street lights flickering on, a pair of lovers on the grass inventing new variations on loneliness. I'll eye the chain-link net and start from mid-court. A head fake for passing hoodlums, a stutter step for Richard, then four dribbles, a lift of my knee, and I'll rise, rise, a slow smoke.

One leaves the world of Erasable Walls exhilerated, with the sense of one's own world enlarged and enhanced.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0932826601
• ISBN 13: 9780932826602
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 66