Under World Arrest

Eshleman (Antiphonal Swing) here begins with an ars poetica that poses the question, ``What is missing?'' The question echoes throughout a sprawling collection. For this poet, our present age is marked by an absurd level of cruelty and violence; and poetry, if it is to address that at all, must rise to the same frenetic level. As he points out, ``Look what men do to women. Why should art be less?'' With such an intent in mind, one might anticipate a certain amount of moralizing. But Eshleman gives the volume a refreshingly bizarre array of imagery through which incidents like the Bosnian civil war are viewed. Intermixed with this are poems of beauty and humor-for instance, a waiter in Los Angeles introduces himself with ``HI, my name's Bruce, I'm your waiter,/ I tried to kill myself last night.'' Though Eshleman's language, owing much to the associative leaps of surrealism, is never pompous, some of his work does read like a Blakean proverb. No matter: he is a reverse prophet, returning to 13,000 B.C. to crouch in a cave of ancient paintings and describe our world on the wall. (Sept.)