Clayton Eshleman

Softcover, 126 pages ISBN: 1-57423-192-8 2004, $16.95 My Devotion new poems by Clayton Eshleman "An Eshleman poem is unmistakable from the first glance. Image jams against image, not impressionistically but in service of a passionately argued line of reason, a line in which an idea, before completion, turns into another idea, and then another. . . ." —Eliot Weinberger In this, his first collection of poems since From Scratch (1998), Clayton Eshleman presents another masterly set of variations on his signature themes: the origins of consciousness as traced in Upper Paleolithic cave art (“Ah, the early imaginal chewing, breaking / down worlds, extracting their fusional juices”) and the collective early-human consciousness that underlies all our thoughts (“I disappeared,” says a 90,000-year-old hominid skull, addressing the reader—“I disappeared into you”). Here are topical poems of protest and resistance; also timeless lyrics of descent, regeneration, and rebirth—poems of a piece with the vast, glittering web of personal myth and imagery that Eshleman has been spinning for almost four decades now.   But the great surprise of My Devotion is how tender, how elegiac many of Eshleman’s recent poems are, among them a sequence documenting the life, work, and final illness of the late Ann Mikolowski, a painter of land-, sea- and skyscapes. Most moving of all are the many lyrics about the courage, beauty, humor, and desire of the poet’s wife, Caryl; also her growing fragility, and the poet’s first intimations of a life without her. In My Devotion, we see one of our great mythmakers taking new possession of the everyday world, a world of things, persons, and relationships he is only too reluctant to abandon.   Softcover, 192 pages ISBN: 1-57423-070-0 1998, $16.95   From Scratch by Clayton Eshleman "One is tempted to think of Eshleman as the H. P. Lovecraft of postmodernist poetry. His images possess a disquieting sense of actuality, of being alive. They are not, however, merely sensationalistic effects but are symptoms of a state of mind, incarnations of psychic events. The anguish and ecstasies of an unquenchable thirst for more life, of a depth psychology based on an archetypal perspective. A movement out of ego into psyche. A movement out of the egg of circumscribed subjectivity into the timeless labyrinths of the underworld." ––John Olson, American Book Review From Scratch is a suite of sinewy new poems, each exploring a station on one poet's way toward self-creation. Here is the growth of Clayton Eshleman's creative psyche from mud-caked Midwestern taproot to mature cosmopolitan flower, from inchoate youth to subtle mythologist of the caveman and of Paleolithic consciousness ("a single smoking road runs from Indianapolis to Lascaux!"). Here are hymns of praise for the great image-makers of the late Ice Age and to their modern descendants (Soutine, de Kooning, Nora Jaffe); here too are tributes to the master-spirits of the poet's inner life (Blake, Vallejo, Artaud). Eshleman's is a highly individual poetry, yet one that demonstrates how each of us belongs, not just to our self, but also to those numberless selves who've gone before and to the collective human consciousness that underlies all our thoughts.    Softcover, 204 pages ISBN: 1-57423-935-X 1998, $15.95   Under World Arrest poems by Clayton Eshleman Softcover, 164 pages ISBN: 1-57423-760-8 1989, $12.95   Hotel Cro-Magnon poems by Clayton Eshleman Softcover,  245 pages ISBN: 0-87685-652-0 1986 $14.95 The Name Encanyoned River Selected Poems 1960-1985 by Clayton Eshleman   Softcover, 152 pages ISBN: 1-57423-579-6 1983, $13.95   Fracture poems by Clayton Eshleman Softcover, 120 pages ISBN: 1-57423-472-2 1981, $11.95   Hades in Manganese poems by Clayton Eshleman