The Philosopher Savant by Rustin Larson

A Bittersweet Celebration of Life

​Review by Hélène Cardona

The Philosopher Savant by Rustin Larson
Paperback: 62 pages
Publisher: Glass Lyre Press (2015)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1941783122












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​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.

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The reviewer

Hélène Cardona is the author of six books, most recently Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves (both from Salmon Poetry); and the translations Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, White Pine Press), winner of a Hemingway Grant, Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux, Éditions du Cygne); Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb, and Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona, Salmon Poetry).

The recipient of many awards, her work has been translated into 15 languages. She contributes essays to The London Magazine, co-edits Plume, Fulcrum, and Levure Littéraire, and received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. She holds a Master’s in American Literature from the Sorbonne, worked as a translator/interpreter for the Canadian Embassy in Paris, and taught at Hamilton College and LMU.
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