Search for Survivors

In his earlier collections of poetry, Erik La Prade wrote sensitively and lyrically of his personal reactions to modern urban life. In his new book, Search for Survivors, La Prade explores a different environment: small, history-laden communities in upstate NY. In these poems, he contemplates the changing seasons, landscapes, and wildlife, as he hikes trails through lands once farmed by past generations and now being reclaimed by Nature. These farmlands with their decomposing barns and natural surroundings represent a mythic history of "America." In his poems, La Prade presents images of this rural beauty, decay, and transformation. These poems are permeated by echoes of earlier lives and histories. Search for Survivors is an elegiac portrait of a land and a nation where rapidly changing social and cultural priorities are erasing our collective memories of the past. La Prade's poems remind us that the threads of history run everywhere through our lives, and we ignore them to our detriment.