Sign

David Mutschlecner

Reviews of the book

“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) . . . . Consisting of mostly 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. . . . Mutschlecner is always careful and spare—admirable qualities in any poet.” —from the review in Phoebe by Joe Hall

“In the end, Sign is a personal take on theology—a way to make religion as natural and important as breathing. In ‘In Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream,’ Mutschlecner gives us this definition:

Philosophy: flour
blown into the face
of the starving man
who asked for bread.

Fortunately, Sign is much more substantial a meal.” —from the review in Rain Taxi by John Findura