If Richard Dutcher is the Mormon Spielberg, and Sam Cardon the Mormon John Williams, then I have found the Mormon Derek Walcott. I had him there, briefly, six years ago, and then lost him. But now he's found, and his name is Lance Larsen. I won't be losing him again.

Way back in December 1996, I made my first (and so far only) trip from Australia to the United States and stayed with good friends in Alpine, Utah. I had only been baptised six months and was full of a new convert's excitement, and there I was in Utah breathing the same air as the prophet. I was pretty light-headed. One day I picked up the Deseret News (or the Church News, I was too new to tell the difference) and found a poetry section. Read the first poem that stood out to me. Wow. Amazing verses, refined, subtle. About a man bringing a young boy into a dry font, showing him how he is going to be baptised one day. I read through it once, twice. A prickle ran down my back. This is the real thing, I said out loud to whoever was there in the room. Stabbed the paper with my finger, saying, you've got to read this. A real poem by a real poet.

I had no expectation of finding such a thing. But there it was, jackpot first time. Then, in my haste to make sure that everyone read it whether they wanted to or not, the paper got mislaid. What was the poet's name, the name of the poem? I had no idea. Never mind, I'll find another copy. Except I never did.

Six years passed, and I never forgot that poem. In that time, I discovered AML-List, Eugene England, Richard Dutcher, Eric Samuelsen, Margaret Young and others. Mormon lit, Mormon cinema, even Mormon belles lettres. Every time I heard of a poet, I tried to find out, is it him? It never seemed to be so.

And then a week or so ago, I found something. A poem on the internet, under an article in Meridian Magazine. It wasn't the same one I had read before, but within a few verses I knew this was the guy. The voice, diction, everything- it was unmistakably him. Lance Larsen is his name, and the subject of the article is his first collection titled Erasable Walls. (Article at http://www.meridianmagazine.com/poetry/030108exaltingprint.html.)

The article gives three poems from the book in their entirety, and a quick Google search later, I had a fourth from Lance Larsen's BYU website. Bingo. It was the same one I had read six years before, titled "Water". I read it again, a happy reunion, but the happiest thing was that I liked its siblings from the Meridian article even better.

This is therefore an odd review. I haven't read Erasable Walls.It's on order from Amazon (deseretbook.com has no record of the title) but I am so entranced by the four poems I do havefrom it that I just can't wait for it to arrive. I have to talk about these poems, and why I think Larsen is the real thing, the biggie.

First, a sampling, from "Funeral Home":

To his left, scalpels fanned out
like silverware. Behind him,
a power drill with industrial bits.
Even then I knew this was not
about careers. But who cared?
He was explaining the slow dissolve
of the body, how it unlocks
itself to the blade.

The lines are creepy yet oddly comforting. The gut-wrenching power of the medical examiner's tools (I especially like the industrial bits) is nonetheless subordinate to the skill and steady hand of experience. And pitch-perfect images in those last few lines. There is no blood or guts, sawing or scraping. This is a master's hand. Or indeed the Master Himself. (I speak from some contrary experience here. In a human anatomy class, in another lifetime, I had the opportunity to dissect an untouched human leg. The experience was drawn out, frustrating, and culminated in my completely severing the sciatic nerve, the thing I was supposed to preserve, in a last fevered bit of cutting.)

The immediate theme of the poem is the inner self. The physical discoveries inside corpses left behind by their owners are all moral revelations. The poem's very first lines contrast the healthy lungs of an 84-year-old woman with the brown, vile lungs of a middle-aged heavy smoker. The ME mentions the drunks, junkies and deadbeats he has known. "Draining them, he said,you feel / this energy, either good or bad... It's a matter of accumulation, / what you take in."

The poem ends with these lines:

His voice
lifted me straight onto the table.
Razored me open. He was reaching in.
My stomach. My liver, my kidneys.
Lifting one organ at a time.
I wasn't afraid. I wanted it this easy --
The heart something you could
weigh in the palm, goodness
as simple as turning down a smoke.

I can't do justice to the deftness, the lightness of touch, the sizzle of these lines. But then suddenly there's that very last phrase. At first glance, it seemed to convey a whiff of didacticism, a glib, too-easy moral summation. Then I re-read it, carefully this time, and found much more delicacy. Straight to mind also came Derek Walcott's "The Light of the World", another meditation on aspects of goodness, which climaxes on a similar note of naked, almost embarrassing openness:

O Beauty, you are the light of the world!

Derek Walcott's ferns obligingly curl themselves into question marks, frigate birds fly to the beat of scansion. The substance and material of life runs seamlessly into the substance of the page. Larsen's viscera on the slab are part of the fleshly table of his poem, and they are weighed in the balance, hopefully not found wanting. Easy? Simple? As easy as writing a poem about how the most frail, fallible, decaying flesh leads to that which is exalted. In another poem, "Errand", he writes:

Your errand, tongue, to know
the exact savor of the world's flesh.
Then to translate beyond it.
...
What nourishes. What sometimes
rots. How even worms prepare us.

Explaining why a poem takes the breath away is rather like explaining why a joke is funny. The subject is dead before it leaves the table. I'm a poor critic of poetry; in fact, I'm no critic at all. I just adore what poetry, new-minted language, can do. (OK, I have to admit, I'm also a hopeless Walcott fan... I could go on about him, but that isn't really on topic.)

All I can really say, be it clumsily or not, is that Larsen's poems speak for themselves. Read them, and be amazed.

Jason Covell