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Howling Enigma
DEAR RUSTIN, “I still talk to my father...” or “History” or “One Cup of Tea” or “We Iowans...” Thank you for your most consoling and compelling HOWLING ENIGMA!! YOUR WORDS always ring truth to me! --Naomi S. Nye in Texas & your FAN.
40 pages, Paperback
Published May 20, 2018
4 people want to read
About the author
Rustin Larson
27 books20 followersRustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry East, The Atlanta Review and other magazines. Crazy Star, his latest collection, 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 five-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 lives in Fairfield, Iowa.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 17, 2019
Rustin Larson’s Howling Enigma begins with a cornucopia of fruit and flowers amid the snow filled landscape of Iowa, where “Beowulf lives.” He describes it at times welcoming, in bloom, with “herbs / the Gerber daisies, the fall violets, the dandelion greens” and “mulberry seedlings” and at times stark, with “pale frost on the window,” “the snow’s endless and cascading curtain” and where “sitting / in the sun is just a fantasy. / It’s six above zero.”
A deeply moving tribute to his parents and ancestors, this is a haunted collection where Larson spends “time with those who have gone on before me.” Memories, photos and dreams bring his kin back: “I still talk to my father in dreams. / Sometimes I see my mother from a distance.” Emotions are sparse yet hit you hard: “My grandmother hugged me / the way a mountain hugs stone.”
Like a leitmotiv, underneath it all, solitude.
“I wind up in places
that just seem to underline
the nature of solitude.”
And what a treat for the reader to share Larson’s solitude, which echoes Rilke:
“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
Larson has gifted us a book of mournful love, filled with nature and animals, a far-reaching goodness that permeates all in spite of the darkness he embraces.
GOLDEN BUDDHA
You are Golden Buddha. You are the light
Of the world. I say this in my head to
Everyone. A fine electrical night.
Hums with water, carbon molecules, through-
Out the Eastern Seabord. Computers fail
In the morning, a cool day, a brilliant blue,
For miles. I don’t see you much in the pale
Light. You are my other soul. In the night,
We lie next to each other for hours: ale
Bottles, groves of trees dripping with light,
A waterfall lit by lanterns: babies
Cry in their own language lit by the tight
Hooks and loops of alphabet, flower dyes
Soaked to color the body, soul, and sky.
Such an ode keeps the darkness at bay.
“At night, I sit on my lawn an stare into the darkness.”
Larson’s poems are bridges, hovering between the living and the dead, light and dark, where the past and the future are intertwined, and a guitar plays in the background.
Like Berryman’s ghost, Larson casts a spell with poems full of “imagination, love, intellect—and pain.”
The poet’s meticulous observations of his surroundings and every day life, such as the “patterns in the wind” read like tender - at times disquieted - unfolding stories, his vast spirit and benevolence permeating everything.
Naomi Shihab Nye wrote that Larson’s words “always ring true” to her. They do. There is never a false note in Larson’s poetry. They slow time to a more propitious pacing, acting as a balm. What a wondrous meditation, from which the reader returns soothed, and vibrant.
Review first published in North of Oxford.
A deeply moving tribute to his parents and ancestors, this is a haunted collection where Larson spends “time with those who have gone on before me.” Memories, photos and dreams bring his kin back: “I still talk to my father in dreams. / Sometimes I see my mother from a distance.” Emotions are sparse yet hit you hard: “My grandmother hugged me / the way a mountain hugs stone.”
Like a leitmotiv, underneath it all, solitude.
“I wind up in places
that just seem to underline
the nature of solitude.”
And what a treat for the reader to share Larson’s solitude, which echoes Rilke:
“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
Larson has gifted us a book of mournful love, filled with nature and animals, a far-reaching goodness that permeates all in spite of the darkness he embraces.
GOLDEN BUDDHA
You are Golden Buddha. You are the light
Of the world. I say this in my head to
Everyone. A fine electrical night.
Hums with water, carbon molecules, through-
Out the Eastern Seabord. Computers fail
In the morning, a cool day, a brilliant blue,
For miles. I don’t see you much in the pale
Light. You are my other soul. In the night,
We lie next to each other for hours: ale
Bottles, groves of trees dripping with light,
A waterfall lit by lanterns: babies
Cry in their own language lit by the tight
Hooks and loops of alphabet, flower dyes
Soaked to color the body, soul, and sky.
Such an ode keeps the darkness at bay.
“At night, I sit on my lawn an stare into the darkness.”
Larson’s poems are bridges, hovering between the living and the dead, light and dark, where the past and the future are intertwined, and a guitar plays in the background.
Like Berryman’s ghost, Larson casts a spell with poems full of “imagination, love, intellect—and pain.”
The poet’s meticulous observations of his surroundings and every day life, such as the “patterns in the wind” read like tender - at times disquieted - unfolding stories, his vast spirit and benevolence permeating everything.
Naomi Shihab Nye wrote that Larson’s words “always ring true” to her. They do. There is never a false note in Larson’s poetry. They slow time to a more propitious pacing, acting as a balm. What a wondrous meditation, from which the reader returns soothed, and vibrant.
Review first published in North of Oxford.
January 30, 2020
Rustin Larson writes like Michael Angelo paints, architects, and sculpts. There is no other Rustin Larson.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews