Customer Reviews

Loving the Good Driver: Poems

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(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."

(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."

(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.

(Ann Struthers in The Des Moines Sunday Register) "Loving the Good Driver" is the first volume from Rustin Larson, Aa Des Moines native. As many contemporary poets do, Larson often utilizes place in his work. Not all the poems in this volume are Iowa poems, because he has obviously lived other places and traveled extensively, but there are a number of locales here that Iowans will recognize, including "The Upper Iowa River Curved Through An Open Valley Flanked by Wooded Hillsides" and "Putting Up," about canoeing the Des Moines River near Bonaparte. Larson writes in free verse, and his similes are especially good. He pulls "the comforter over me/like a lawn..." In the title poem he says, "and you too the marriage//the way a cat takes to drowning..." Later in that poem he watches "the moon//rise like a Bismarck, jelly filled.... In "The Lawn" he finds "white violets/that rest on the thick green like disabled stars." Larson also uses a great deal of free association in his subject matter. In fact, some of the poems are abstract to the point of being Picasso-esque. There is a pleasant vein of humor througout the work, however, In "Melons," he tells how he and his wife try to buy a perfect melon, but the fruits always begin "to shrink from inside/like a consumptive." Everything reminds them of melons and they find themselves thinking constantly about them. "Our shoes became melon rinds, and our fingers, slivers of ripe/yellow melon." Finally he realizes he can no longer "live like a melon...." Then he sits down and holds "my big round head in my hands." The unwritten joke is obvious to the reader. The best thing about it is Larson is making the joke on himself, a nice bit of humility from a poet, poets not know for that particular virtue. If there are grotesques that do not seem charged with the insistence for the grotesque, and abstractions that seem to be left hanging in limbo, still Larson does not take himself too seriously. In this first volume, he has made an excellent beginning.

Rustin Larson's Crazy Star is among the best poetry collections this reviewer has read in recent years... Underlying their sharp-edged cynicism and ironical twists is a heartfelt investigation into what it means to be human... A stylistically diverse collection Crazy Star gives us compelling reason to be carefully attentive to those extraneous forces that would define us. Larson is an essential voice for this new millennium. - W. E. Butts , The Small Press Review

'Like a baseball pitcher with an unpredictable changeup, Rustin Larson's poetry continually surprises, challenges, and rewards the reader.' - Roger Weingarten

'Rustin Larson is a terrific, elegant, original poet whose voice rings so truly we become better people just by reading him.' -- Naomi Shihab Nye

Crazy Star is luminous, delightful, serious yet subtly self-deprecating and quietly outrageous. When Larson is on, as he is in poem after poem in this collection, he is as good as anyone writing today, maybe better. Just read "Woman praying to her Umbrella" or "Tell me about the Wasp Again" and I know you'll agree. -- Michael Carey, poet, editor of Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets

Rustin Larson's brilliantly crafted Crazy Star will break your heart and make you realize the treasures in your own clearance sale. Make you want to hitch your star to his quiet, sardonic hilarity that's staying home, 'hitchhiking for something divine.' --Jack Myers, National Poetry Series winner, author of 'As Long as You're Happy'

This is a strange and beautiful collection from a gifted poet. Read these poems and be startled.' - Meg Fitz-Randolph, The Iowa Source