Top Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Haunted by the likes of Proust, Crane, Whitman, Shihab Nye, Keats and Shakespeare
By Helene Cardona on December 24, 2015
Rustin Larson’s exquisitely crafted new collection The Philosopher Savant mixes the ordinary, real world with surreal, fantastical visions. “I arrive at a mansion / Surrounded by fallen branches/ And ice. / Inside are chairs / That resemble lions / Or laws / Or the boredom of kings.” He reminds us of the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges: “A piano, / With its keys locked under its cover, / Is some giant creature / At the bottom of the sea, /Waiting.” Like a painter saturating the colors of Earth, exalting its geography from delirious beauty to war nightmares, Larson takes the reader on a dreamlike journey, filled with flashbacks, family memories, and ghosts.
The Philosopher Savant is a moving and powerful tribute to the past, bittersweet, funny, and heartbreaking. Themes of absence, loss and abandonment are set against a backdrop of fire and ice, in a landscape whose gardens, blooming with geraniums, lilies, marigolds, lilac, roses, orchids, honeysuckle and thistle, in “gangrened earth,” are reminiscent of Richard Matheson’s novel and Vincent Ward’s movie What Dreams May Come. “These hands / Pick the fire flowers, darkness in part, / Sun in the other. Close the cabinet, / Cover my earth. Shovel on the rich heart,/ Crown star, traveler’s joy, blazing vetch.” Melancholic, unflinching and unexpected, The Philosopher Savant, haunted by the likes of Proust, Crane, Whitman, Shihab Nye, Keats and Shakespeare, upon whose shoulders Larson rests, pulsates like jazz and celebrates life.
–Hélène Cardona, Award-winning author of Dreaming My Animal Selves
