https://www.amazon.com/dp/1421837781/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1492796497&sr=8-3&keywords=Rustin+Larson
pulsates like jazz and celebrates life
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
The Philosopher Savant
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Review by Stephen Page
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In the first poem of the book the narrator, as a young boy, skips church and wanders the countryside, discovering new truths, learning he is able to think for himself, coming to his own conclusions about himself and the world, and finding out he is not bound by non-secular dogma. This is where the Philosopher Savant comes into being.
The book follows the remembrances, dreams, fears, evaluation, assessments, and vision of the Philosopher Savant. He is an average person, a father, a householder with a job—but he has a vagrant soul and the fugue vision of a shaman.
Larson writes in the veins of Whitman and Shakespeare. Some of his poems read as contemporized sonnets, and they have as much genius entwined as Shakespeare’s. While reading the poems, I had a feeling of transcending my self, a oneness with the “all”. The thesis of…
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Lateral Meniscus of the Archangel (Paperback, 382 Pages)
Rustin Larson’s poetry 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.” –Hélène Cardona
Faulkner
I wish I could show you the source of my amusement but I
can’t it was delivered in an ice box three hundred million years
ago and it has been there since anticipating time or the mind
that will discover time on the shores of some mossy
simultaneously existing/non-existing primordial earth It sits
there silent and square totally emotionless to the tiny grubs and
centipedes that crawl over its smooth porcelain skin Totally
inert but inside it is something that will outlast the shores and
water even the sun and myriad furry life forms that will bump
and crawl their way to the edge of their individual eternities It
is there denting the sand silent unmoved not feeling hunger
because hunger isn’t yet thought of nothing there to think it not
happy because happiness is still unboiled stagnant and cold as
unreal as the possessions and human bodies that will
someday give it birth
from The Dryland Fish, 2003
