Loving the Good Driver: Poems [Paperback]

Rustin Larson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 58 pages
• Publisher: Edwin Mellen Pr (July 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0773426728
• ISBN-13: 978-0773426726
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,835,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rustin Larson's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry East, The Atlanta Review and other magazines. The Wine-Dark House (Blue Light Press, 2009) is his latest collection. Crazy Star, his previous, was selected for the Loess Hills Book's Poetry Series in 2005. Larson won 1st Editor's Prize from Rhino magazine in 2000 and has won prizes for his poetry from The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation among others. A seven-time Pushcart nominee, and graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing, Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival in 2002 and 2004, a featured writer in the DMACC Celebration of the Literary Arts in 2007, 2008, and has been highlighted on the public radio programs Live from Prairie Lights and Voices from the Prairie. He is the host of the radio talk show Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost http://www.kruufm.com and lives in Fairfield, Iowa.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Zany! Original!, April 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Loving the Good Driver: Poems (Paperback)

(Ken Goosens in Visions International)"'Melons' is zany, original and delightfully absurdist. 'Creatures Nobody Recognizes' does a fine job building on the subject of an empty cicada shell... superior poems."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finalist for the New Issues Poetry Prize!, April 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Loving the Good Driver: Poems (Paperback)

(Meg Hill Fitz-Randolph in The Iowa Source)"Rustin Larson is a narrative poet who breaks with tradition. A poet whose complex sensibility drives deeper and deeper into the wild and least expected... This is a strange and beautiful collection from a gifted poet."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everywhere his mind reaches like a gravedigger..., April 19, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Loving the Good Driver: Poems (Paperback)

(from MANDRAKE POETRY REVIEW, Autumn 1997) These poems flow broadly as rivers bearing the exposed flotsam of a civilization toward the tumultuous oceans of ultimate chaos. No appreciation is displayed of a lyrical purity or of a lyrical clarity, and music is a bywater long passed by. Picking the ones that heal, the ones to eat, to brew, to hang for fragrance, I walk with my new wife, her moist palm in mine. The herbs fountain from the ground; sunlovers, shadelovers, those finding it hard. Unnerved by the stranger we married, we search for the right plant to solve us. Here's one, gold and dried, hanging from the ceiling of the herb cottage. We should brew this as tea, bathe in it: its essences clearing our blood, synchronizing heartbeats, and breath. She uncovers a cluster of green, holds it like a bride's bouquet, saying we should both hold on until we trust its fragility in the different seasons: her early spring, my autumn. This example displays his rich voice at its precisest, while he is closest to his words and closest to his essence of sentience. Almost he has become his process. We might notice that he was uncertain whether to say "clearing our blood" or to say "cleansing our blood" and that he opted to stress the achievement of clarity rather than to stress the approach toward clarity. In his attempt to embrace grandeur he chats about his dad's listening to Harry James playing Rinsky-Korsakov while aboard ship in World War 2, and he mentions how we can be comforted or discomforted by our sense of touch, and everywhere his mind reaches like a gravedigger to toss us the bones of thought.