JUNIPER FUSE: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld

Clearly and intensely focused, this 14th collection from Eshleman flows among styles of critical analysis, narrative, image and verse and invents a new form of phenomenological ekphrasis in the process. Eshleman centers the work on concrete and beautiful descriptions of cave paintings. His musings on the nature of metaphor, and its roots in the primal act of creating a figure, may not be radically groundbreaking, but they find a clarity that is as much of Plato as of Lascaux: "An animal drawn on a wall/ puts a window into that wall." "Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc D'Audoubert" includes jottings and figures, a sort of record of the first perceptions of a resonant space. But the book's real strength lies in the honesty of its attention to the deep, fearful, mortal stirrings of poetic consciousness, as well as about the visionary and beautiful ones: "The main thing that kept me going was a blind belief that if I worked through the sexism, self-hate, bodilessness, soullessness, and suffocated human relationships that encrusted my background, I could tear down the 'House of Eshleman' and lay out a new foundation in its place." Eshleman founded and edited the journals Caterpillar and Sulfur , did magisterial translations of Aimé Cesaire and won a National Book Award for his translation of Cesar Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry . This latest foray proves a disarming opening to the cave and allows for a reading experience that is almost collaborative. (Nov.)