Sign - David Mutschlecner

Ahsahta Press, 2007
Paperback. 92 pgs.
Review by Joe Hall

One leaves Sign hungry, parched. Things are eroded down to the bare bone of the eye and mind: “Eidetic / steps / the eye / ascends.” The line is the mind moving with deliberation, calculation. Absence is signified everywhere—from the body of his magnificent whale-like something scattered across the landscape to the gutted skulls that litter “The Night Watch” and “In Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream.” There is an admirable hardness to Mutschlecner’s lines, a refusal to make easy meaning, and, indeed, poems such as “The Night Watch” end evocatively: “Ask the skull a question / All hold Golgotha in their hands” (7). Yet there are also spots in which the habitual spareness of the line seems at variance with impulse of the poem. An example:

Wind sings into the mouth,
howls, cries into the mouth
gravid
with the memory of some
first sea

Mutschlecner’s strategy of isolating of this “first sea” on its own line to give it weight shuts down the rhythmic possibilities of the first two lines and doesn’t seem as effective in it the desired gravity as further expanding upon the image.

In terms of thematics, Mutschlecner evokes a spiritual crisis that takes on, sometimes, incongruously, national dimensions. Phrases like “a nose cone whose blown-back thought balloon / can no longer be read” burst out from the hermeticism of a landscape defined by arid philosophic language and elemental images. Later we find a much blunter assessment of crisis: “Gathering at the cusp / of our country’s wavering age. Many lusts / whirling in the heat and wanting / to pierce the light- / bulb” (51). Yet these gestures are far and few between—they seem to promise larger forays into more tactile land that never happen. As is, they remain unconvincing in their attempts to expand the significance of Mutschlecner’s investigations. Best not imply that missile silos and flickering screens are the substrata of our consciousness without saying something new about this.

Sign becomes much more compelling when not in the American apocalypse mode, but, rather, when it is affirming, invoking—not invoking absence in lines whittled down to nothing or images immediately taken back—but in attempting to positively name the holy, in admitting desire into its diction. This is riskier: “Lucenti / Incendi / Dello / Spirito / Santo” – pure naming which flanks, on either side, on discrete lines, a vertical column which spells out “IMMANUEL” (76). We go from the eye moving across the parched landscape and the mind pushing through the difficulties of appetite and the difficulties of attention—what prevents ritual praise—to the enactment of ritual language.

Consisting of mostly long poems long poems divided into numbered sections, Sign invites the reader to encounter it less as a collection of discreet poems and more as a unified whole. And there is a general movement from the absences of the first section to the stirrings of grace in the third. While the first and final sections, particularly “In Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream” and “Poems for the Feast of Corpus Christi” largely succeed at what they set about doing, the second section, though not without its pleasures, is, as a whole, unsuccessful in sustaining the general dramatic impulse of the book.

Mutschlecner is always careful and spare—admirable qualities in any poet, but I suspect that beneath the needle like spines of the lines he has given us (dutifully stuffed with biblical and philosophical reference) is a milky core of sensuous language waiting to emerge and more fully complement and complicate what we are given in Sign.

***

Joe Hall is finishing his MFA in poetry at George Mason University where he is a Thesis Fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Versal and others.