The Mastery Impulse by Ricardo Pau-Llosa is the final book in a trilogy that also includes Cuba (1993) and Vereda Tropical (1999). In the earlier books, one encounters the longing and restlessness of a writer in exile. He is of "old Cuba" before Fidel Castro. He is a man, wherever he goes, who is walking with a foot in two countries, two times separated by decades. He sees with two pairs of eyes: one pair luxuriates in the fullness that the world offers and the other pair sees what has been taken away and is always being taken away. In the books Cuba and Vereda Tropical, this dialectic is overt, but in The Mastery Impulse, it is folded more deeply into the text.
          It becomes quickly obvious to the reader that Pau-Llosa’s writing is greatly influenced by Wallace Stevens’. Also very much a poet-thinker, Pau-Llosa attempts to erase the distinction between poetry and philosophy. Philosophically, his major influence is Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology. The result is a book flooded with sensuous imagery tangled in a web of ideas. Add to this Pau-Llosa’s interest in visual arts–he is also an art critic–and the poems achieve an often stunning turn-of-phrase and complexity not often found in poetry today.
          The Mastery Impulse is divided into four sections, each with a distinct subject or agenda. The reader could easily believe, having read the first section titled "Like," that this is a reworked, elevated version of W. C. Williams’ "No ideas but in things." Each poem focuses, takes as its inspiration, an object: scotch tape, dice, metal chairs, sandbags, a chalk eraser, crumpled paper, trash, and more. But Pau-Llosa doesn’t just meditate or impose meaning on these objects; rather, he presents us with consciousness conjuring itself, where meaning, though essential, is a byproduct. In and from that conjuring come contradictions that are our passions. A piece of Scotch tape "refuses to petal off the tips [of our fingers]/into the willing pail–/resembles the inopportune bite/of passion. . . ." This is a farfetched image unless we are willing to parse it with the idea that experience pulls us in and doesn’t let go easily, or at all, causing "all that dancing/all that fury" as we try to free ourselves or surrender to it.
          Pau-Llosa cannot be read without coming to terms with his ideas. Yes, there is rich, variegated language, but without the ideas the poems are just fancy dressing. It is not always easy to be fully cognizant of his intentions, as in these lines from the poem "Entangled White Metal Patio Table Legs and Frames Beneath Concrete Stairs": "Guitars, arteries, mangrove root./To say and make the world ours/through and for the ambush./Gathering is gratitude." Consciousness creates a world by gathering objects together. We become our own creation, we possess and destroy. This seemingly random flow of consciousness, this hunting and gathering, this process, is how we rejoice in and are one with the world.
          In the second section, "Teatro Natura," the poems lead us deeper into the way imagination shapes our understanding of nature and our primal instincts. On a guided canoe trip he observes, to temper his imagination and the culture's need to generate heroes, "we are in a haiku of life not an epic." What are we left with if "adventure alone will not keep us/in our chains of sweat and death"? If there is a saving perspective it is "The form (that) is always with us. . . /it is the world that makes sense/of itself by the pretense of leaving it." The pretense is our imagination. We foreshadow our own deaths. We hear this in the next poem: "Someone has had the gall/to make us see ourselves in the process/of losing ourselves." Imagination creates and destroys. And for those of us still clinging to the epic, "the only instruments that can/be trusted are the cage and the mirror." We must face up to and contain our egomania that produces false heroics; after all life is only a haiku, a brief but powerful imagining.
          The third section, "Parable," ends with the poem "The Raft of the Medusa." If you read only one poem from The Mastery Impulse, make it this one. Here Pau-Llosa’s philosophical ruminations and his artistic concerns coalesce, collude, collide into a long poem on the necessity of art and storytelling. The stimulus for the poem is Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People and Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, the State and the state of the soul, and Husserl, Cicero, and the ancient Athenians. When the speaker of that poem was young, we learn, he saw philosophy and art everywhere. But history has taken its toll:

I am tired of history because I have loved to hope.
When Géricualt put me on the Raft near dead
I gladly kneeled to the life of art
and the death of the state. Now you want to know
to what, if anything, I bow. To accidents
and to welcome patterns like breath and snow,
rain, and sex constant as pages.

Having lost his optimism, he sees that we are all on a sinking raft about to drown: "What is this love of water all about . . ./As if the imagination were the troubled Noah after all.//We are all afraid, but most men sculpt their lives into celebrations of what they lack." We float on the raft of imagination. It’s what buoys us and keeps us alive. What feeds the imagination is the unscrolling perceptions of consciousness within the vessels of art and ideas.