A Mnemonic for Desire [Paperback]

Steve Mueske (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2006

In this collection, language becomes a device for remembering our forgotten impulses and hidden longings, a place where a "song forms, rising out of nothing." Rendered through the poet's unique vision, the transformations and landscapes of the natural world and the everyday routines and accidents of the common individual become endeavors meant to uncover the concealed significance of existence. These poems presents the reader with new and ephemeral possibilities, boundaries that are "There and gone, erased. Redrawn," reminding us of our most basic yearnings and poetry's redemptive potential.

Product Details

• Paperback: 116 pages
• Publisher: Ghost Road Press (February 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097712729X
• ISBN-13: 978-0977127290
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,024,933 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Debut, August 21, 2006

By 

Cheryl Snell (Washington DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Mnemonic for Desire (Paperback)

Steve Mueske's debut collection, "A Mnemonic for Desire", touches not only on memory and desire but articulates a way of looking at the world. It reconciles the lyrical with the grim, examines the impulses toward hope and despair. With so many poems so remarkable in range, the work looms large. The book itself is generous for a first collection--113 pages, with characters as varied as a black and yellow spider, a small blue god, Phillip Glass, Frankenstein, and an Amazing New Device That Brings Back the Dead in Lifelike Holographic Images.

The theme of survival surfaces with the first poem, "This Far in August." Mueske observes that "Every wild weed believes it has only one season," and a nearly extinct butterfly "knows only the pang of hunger/and a new season with the freedom/ of wings." The world continually transforms, and this might be one hinge of these poems, the idea of survival through change.

In "The Morning I Become Ombudsman to the World," the speaker must steel himself to join his fellows, fight his own urge toward solitude. He assures us, however reluctantly, that "I will go out/into the world, to love it, unequivocally,//in all its belching verdure, its/endless complaining." Interior and exterior landscapes reveal the ambivalence of the lonely man, who still, as in the dazzling "On Desire," asserts, "I am ready to be unmade."

"Poetry is a kind of song that orders signs, a dialectic between artist as demiurge and reader," the author says in an interview with Joshua Ware. Mueske creates a place of what is out of place. The poems arc over the physical world and our part in it, spread out into all kinds of imaginative tributaries, and return to nature "...where the song forms, rising out of nothing,/with little more than a few ideas about itself."

The pleasures of the collection include esoteric tropes as well as homely ones. "Where Nothing Grows" is a long poem modeled on HD's "Trilogy," and deals with idea of God and the nature of perception. HD wanders the rubble of war looking for a coded message that will reveal order under chaos, while Mueske looks for meaning In the title poem, "The Shrike in the Garden of Machinery," the poet argues with the historical view of creation.

iii.)
Listen. There are three ways to speak.
One involves hiding in the weeds, covered
with stories. Though you may be tempted to,
don't call me Adam. I've never been here before.
I come out of the redness of earth.
My eyes are on fire.
The solid weight of the Pomegranate is a real thing.
Everything else is a mnemonic for desire.

The work explodes with related ideas; rhythm and music and language propel imaginative leaps. There is shape and invention, an appetite for sound. Surreal elements present in some poems, archetypes and dream symbols, yet the elements are recognizable -- a fly with "a bit of spit in hair," cannibalistic butterflies, "thin black pancakes" stacked on an old record player. "The Monster, On Living" is another well-grounded example. "Perhaps it is/ the itch of skin that is and is not/ mine ...Why this desire then,/ this trembling to hold and to name?" says the monster, unable to parse emotions he does not own. Detachment from the body is also detailed in "After Surgery." Physical fragility is contrasted with the cycles in nature several times in the book.

After Surgery

Five days back from the dead
and I'm touching my face in the mirror.
Can this be me, this ghoul from the pit of knives
with his piecework of bandaged skin?
His abdomen is stapled from sternum to pelvis,
caked with blood, and smeared
yellow. I touch the catheter tube
growing like a bean sprout from my [...]
A bag of [...] is strapped to my leg.
My heart is a box of mold.
...I'm one of the lucky ones.

In a moment of vulnerability, the reader is presented with a paradox about the beauty of living; the poet does not hesitate, his voice can be trusted. Mueske makes it both beautiful and believable.

"The Art of Measured Breathing" is one of my favorite poems. Dedicated to a friend with ALS, Mueske traces their friendship from a time when they were "lit like struck matches: untouchable." The phrase "As the years peeled back," signals the turn, and the young man begins to succumb to disease; the language quiets and "His arms grow heavy/with wings, a small price for the sky."

Resonating with craft and skill, each word in every poem of "A Mnemonic for Desire" earns its place, supporting the tone of the whole. The self is always changing, and this poet's voice comes out of his emotional honesty-- authentic, unflinching. Mueske is not afraid of the dark, and only he could have made that small blue god who "sings to the sky because it looks/so much like him, big and full of hope."