Erasable Walls

by Lance Larsen

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0932826601
• ISBN13: 9780932826602
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose
• Length: 66 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Worth the Read

I don't know to whom I could compare Mr. Larson since his poetry has it's own flavor and style. I own 2 of his books and I keep them out where from time to time I will naturally pick one up. When the mood is right I read the poem that most appeals to me.

Larsen's voice is remarkably mature for such a young poet.

In a poetry milieu that seems to favor a defiant stance toward more "traditional" values and a caustic voice, Larsen's book seems to stand out by virtue of its quiet rebellion against the current. This is no empty rebellion, though. It's a conscious, quiet appeal to values that seem to receive only lip service at best in today's culture, but that have become Larsen's own. Recent trends in poetry have almost dictated that a poet needs to view family relationships as burdonsome and constrictive, especially when the poet is young and making a name for his or her self. But Larsen's collection eschews this quasi-requirement by writing about family relationships that are difficult, but ultimately affirmative and rewarding. Larsen begins his collection with an account of his father's own conception, then skips between poems about his wife and children, his parents, and his grandparents, weaving all these family relationships into a web in which "there's too much skin between" the particpants, but in which each seems to find solace in wanting "To touch and be touched." Larsen then pans out and looks at how this web actually seems to exist among others in the world, even though they may not acknowledge it as such. In "A Philanthropist Speaks to His Lawyer," for example, the speaker tells his lawyer to take his dead body to South America and follow a "hobbling woman / with veined calves" who will arrange for his burial. The speaker then predicts, "Humming softly, she will rub me / with scented oils, then lay me between / her sofa and broken radio." In the last section, Larsen illuminates how this web has effected him. He begins by with an account of a nest of "things [he] saved...mantis legs, cat fur, / porcupine quills tied up with twine." Such things seemed like "religion" to him, but by interacting with these treasures, he learns that its not the accumulation of such things that constitutes religion, but rather the interaction and connection to such things-"What it might mean to chew. And to be chewed." Like a Whitman poem or a Wim Wenders film, Larsen's collection acknowledges the difficulties of our lives, but struggles within that framework to find and illuminate meaning and value, which allows us to "Think of rivers" and have hope as we watch the ash of our burning world drift "over fences / and fields, over a dazed cluster of Holsteins / chewing again what they've already swallowed."