Steve Mueske’s A Mnemonic for Desire cultivates a keen eye for description, while paying particular attention to diction and syllabic construction. In his first full-length published book of poetry, Mueske manipulates yearning using a voice ripe with want that can hauntingly resonate, and at times is impeccably accurate in its depiction of desire.

Desire ultimately controls Mueske’s poems. The collection invests in desire’s innate outwardness, its tendency to adjust and readjust, to move in and out of a physical world and see it reflected within a personal, psychological mirror-world of want. Mueske controls the dialogue between these two worlds with his melodic language and lines and his acute sense of scene.

It could be worse, he supposes.

In the next box, a Barbie lies prostrate

on a pile of books, pinpricks covering

the sexless region between her legs.

This excerpt from “Rummage Sale” exhibits Mueske’s successful execution of language and tone, with the percussive alliteration pointing to the reenactment of “supposing” by the narrator, an abandoned Evil Knieval doll. Knieval’s want (to fly; to be “the Elvis of air” again and to “hold Barbie in his arms”) is magnified by the choice of language: “pinpricks,” and “sexless,” and how the percussive alliteration melts away at the end of the stanza along with the lowering vowel registers.

Mueske has a knack for writing beautiful one-liners. In “The Art of Measured Breathing” the reader rediscovers anticipation as “the theatre of… held breath” and tiredness with the line “even light seems freighted.” In “Drought” the sun becomes a “cyclopean eye [that] interrogates.” This is Mueske’s art; his ability to show the reader something normal and craft it into something entirely new.

However, it is that very craft that takes over the entire book. What frustrates Mueske’s poems is their very artifice. Mueske has mastered the art of portraiture, of painting pictures of everyday objects and events and turning them into poems. Yet while he can grasp the physicality of the subjects, his poems rarely invest in any kind of epiphany, and are often constructed solely around description. The poem “Fly,” for example, is a third-person close narration of a fly trapped in a house and trying to escape through a closed window. Twenty-three lines depict the dramatic situation, and the poem ends on the “ha-ha” two-line pun of the fly thinking of “breaking it down eventually,” meaning both the world and the window. The poem is well-crafted and accurate—but ends up only reading as a clever retelling of the fly’s desire for freedom and “a pile of sweet dogshit.”

Mueske’s other, less-scene invested poems like “Second-Shift Father” and “Reunion” work well with the family as subject matter, yet like many other intimate poems in A Mnemonic for Desire Mueske strays away from the personal and translates these poems into the narrative-distant second-person. Occasionally Mueske even shifts away from the first-person to the second-person in the poems themselves. In “Fire Tower,” a nostalgic father-and-son poem about the narrator remembering visiting a fire tower with his father, Mueske’s narrator spends ten-lines in dialogue with a generalized “you,” a break that ends with:

             …at such a sight

one might even believe in

the unity of all things,

least of all father and son.

The shift away from the rest of the poem’s first-person perspective does not justify the “least of all father and son.” This part of the poem seems to focus on some kind of admonishing plea, an “if you were there you would remember the view as opposed to my father” sentiment that attempts to strengthen the emotional resonance of the poem. Rather, it diminishes the revelation, taking away what could have been a poignant sense of narrative self-awareness missing from many of these poems.

That Mueske can consistently cultivate a voice both convincing and authoritative in subject and execution lends to the book’s frustration. His language, when reduced to sounds and syllables, is musical, and often hovers over the poems like a piano in a symphonic concerto. Yet many of his poems halt unexpectedly—as if they were closing in on some particular epiphany, and Mueske would prefer to end the piece a few bars before the finale. Is it a criticism to desire more? A Mnemonic for Desire introduces the reader to new visions of the world, each distinguished by different kinds of longing and want. Mueske, however, seems more invested in the narrator’s eloquent descriptions of scene rather than moving the reader, exploring narrative realization, or actualizing an epiphany.

Todd Dillard (NY)  is the nonfiction editor at Pebble Lake Review. He is an MFA candidate in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the 2004 recipient of the Penani Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in Pebble Lake Review and Poesis.