Search for Survivors

<p>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 <em>Search for Survivors</em> 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. <em>Search for Survivors</em> 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.</p>