Icon

Poetry. ICON is a vivid example of David Mutschlecner's theopoetics, offering devotion to the divine, to poets, and to the earth and materiality itself: "it is supernatural / that language lifts the tree," he writes, and "the gold ground holds / the halo whose gold / bleeds back into the ground." The icon is revealed as anyone's loved face--and that beloved face can help one to know "the stars / half patterned / by the quick breath of the brush." Here, in fact, an icon is being written, and the poem becomes an act of thanksgiving. Mutschlecner upholds his devotion to the trinity of poets always close at hand in his poems: Dickinson, Dante, and Duncan. One finds the grace of bewilderment at the heart of this work.