Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader

This scrupulously edited selection of poems, critical prose and translation represents more than 40 years of work from one of America's most committed, prolific and cosmopolitan poets. From inhabiting the imagination behind Paleolithic cave paintings to holding drunken congress with the spirit of Hart Crane, Eshleman is a visionary, divining in the world at hand the operation of the primordial energies that have animated human culture from its beginning. “All life is present every moment,” he writes, and by “extending... human consciousness” poetry can help us to experience it that way, letting us perceive beyond “the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally... enmeshed.” Transgression is a matter of principle for Eshleman: he is intent on breaking through boundaries and habits—and not only those of perception, but those of good taste as well, even if it means that his representation of the primal sometimes veers into the puerile: “A liquid fart of swear words zigzagged forth.” But Eshleman's feistiness has always served to offset his grace, and to anneal his insight: “It is as if at a certain point in his history man left the thing at hand to quest for immortality, and when that pursuit was revealed to be empty, he was left with the thing at hand.” (Jan.)