~MIKE WHITE~
LANCE
LARSEN: IN
ALL THEIR ANIMAL BRILLIANCE
Almost every poem in the collection bears evidence
of Larsen's singular
knack for compact
and powerful lyric expression. Lines lodge
in the
mind with epigrammatic incisiveness.
There is another world,
but it is in this one.
—Paul Eluard
Lance Larsen is one of those
writers who clings to a quaintly Romantic notion that mortality and
love and soul are the abiding themes of life and art. So much to
the good. While we live in a culture abounding in references to
God, precious little notice is given to the myriad wonders and
mysteries of this life.
Poetry has often had a recuperative
function in this regard. Though not much in fashion of late, the
imaginative impulse to seek out a world of spiritual incandescence in
the midst of our too-familiar world goes to the heart of both an
eastern and western lyric
tradition. In his second collection, In
All Their Animal Brilliance, Larsen maps the hallowed ground we
tread
daily, if only to show how we might know it as
such.
Early on in the book, Larsen makes his allegiances
clear. In "This World, Not the Next," the poet gives us Adam and
Eve learning to love "this world, with its tides and machinery / of
sweet decay." After the Fall, "God blessed / their bounty to be
infinite, but left them / ten crooked fingers to count with" (the last
line break is particularly felicitous in context). Still,
divinity lingers, residual, often hidden, but pervasive in the ways of
the world.
And the byways. In the very next poem, "Winter
Takeout," the poet is out driving alone in a blinding snowstorm.
"Yes to snow heavy as Ecclesiastes," he declares, acknowledging how
sometimes acceptance and even affirmation become the fruits of
adversity. Seeking refuge at a roadside truck stop, the poet
happens to brush up against a harried waitress. This fleeting
instant of human contact sets off small erotic and spiritual fires:
Silly to call
that incident holy. Her
hands didn't linger.
Her minced steps and the pout of
her body
were only fatigue. But so
what? I needed
to be touched.
Almost every poem in the collection bears evidence
of Larsen's singular knack for compact and powerful lyric
expression. Lines lodge in the mind with epigrammatic
incisiveness. Witness these three references to the local fauna:
Settle on nothing, but bring
enough praying
mantises to green up the
day.
["Legion"]
The cricket in the tarantula's
cage
chirrs the next world.
["Want Song"]
At the slaughterhouse, trotters
went in whole
and came out viscera tossed into
a
pickup.
["Santiago
Commute"]
As the last quoted lines suggest, the metamorphic translation of beings
from one mode of existence to another is the dominant motif of the
collection. Beginning with the line, "You enter as a mother on a
bus, exit a blade of grass," the poem "Black Box" imagines a negative, black space of
seemingly infinite transformative possibilities.
This reviewer would have been awfully tempted to title the poem "Phone
Booth," alluding thereby to Superman's favorite transformative haunt;
but, alas, Larsen's poem rightly cautions us that "Transformation is
not a place."
Transformation does, however, often suggest a
direction, and the poems point to different available trajectories of
transcendence. Sometimes the movement is up, as in "Platonic," in
which the poet describes his childhood faith in the talismanic power of
talons worn around the neck. The poem ends:
And when the talons gripped my
finger
till it purpled I felt
great wings feather the air,
straining to pull me out of my
body.
If this poem is reminiscent of Robinson Jeffers in his quest for a
home-brewed apotheosis, we get flashes also of another
twentieth-century devotee of nature, Theodore Roethke. In
"Salamander," the
poet shifts his gaze downward, and discovers an amphibious agent of
transfiguration in the murky "underlife" of the marshes:
If I lifted
you in my palm, like
a compass,
carried you in my mouth,
the way
our first parents did, would your
poisons sweeten
my desire, could I slide
through backyard
pools, like
water before it was
water?
The lyrical heft of passages such as those quoted above are judiciously
balanced by dashes of humor — "Your mouth is a study in late food
poisoning / or early voodoo" ("To a Souvenir Mermaid") — and a wry,
self-ironizing wit that views the outworn self "through a funhouse
mirror," as he puts it in the wise and funny poem, "To My Old
Clothes."
Perhaps the signature virtue of In All Their Animal
Brilliance is the collection's luminous clarity. This is
not to
say that the work is transparent, but rather that it is
welcoming. Notably, these are not lopsided poems, all head or all
heart, but poems that invite and engage the intellect and the emotions
simultaneously, so that the distinction seems hardly to matter.
The tenor of the poems is performative, but quietly so, without the
least taint of showiness or bravado. William Matthews and Larry
Levis come to mind as two late great exemplars in this poetic
mode.
My only gripe — on the order of a trifle — concerns
Larsen's frequent resort to language tropes. On some
level, of course, it is only natural for a poet to experience the world
flush with language, all the more so in a collection devoted to
translation, in all its connotative guises. But
postmodernist-inflected phrases such as "a grammar of waiting" or
"grammar of whiteness" are vague and gestural rather than
evocative. How much more vivid and memorable is the description
of "a catcher's mitt / of a cinnamon roll slathered in icing" ("Winter
Takeout"). Happily, In All
Their Animal Brilliance offers many
such familiar delicacies. This is our world, after all, to which
the poet has lovingly returned
us.
Larsen, Lance. In All
Their Animal Brilliance. Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press,
2005. ISBN: 1879852322
$12.00
© by Mike White
