This Thin Memory A-ha

Poetry. Mnemosyne as memory is mother to the nine muses, who bring us forgetfulness of evil and rest from pain, according to the epic poets. But what does the lyric poet do with the mother of the muses, when his language is plosives and assonance erupting from thickets? "This scriptlessness // will be about subsistence, it will become / the centerpiece of a belief," announces Eric Elshtain near the outset of his remarkable first full-length collection, an antic assembly of highly-wrought hymns and Linnaean hexes in which memory narrows and billows, "while we go headlong / to eat the arms of charlatans // rescuing every rickety magician / from salvation."