Hades in Manganese

Clayton Eshleman

Clayton Eshleman probably knows more detail about more stuff than any poet since Ezra Pound. Which is, no doubt, a good thing, but those who pursue meanings in their poetry are going to run themselves into a very brick, very hard wall when coming upon this mid-era collection of Eshleman's work.

According to its introduction (and how often to books of poetry have introductions? That should tip you off right there), the book is, ostensibly, about cave paintings in France. Modern readers of Eshleman's will be in no way surprised by this, as the cave paintings have long been an obsession of Eshleman's. But to say this is a book of poems about cave paintings is only to scratch the surface; Eshleman is deep into the realm of shamanism here, along with feminism, his usual surrealism, various symbologies, ancient history, animism, and a whole host of other topics I could spend a whole thousand-word review going over. Those who read a poem and at the end first ask “but what does it MEAN?” had better have a library handy at the ending of each poem, because they'll have a lot of looking up to do.

Those of us who ask the proper questions, however, will get a lot more out of this book in a much shorter period of time. The stuff sounds, in the main, wonderful. Even if you don't know what it means (and this is a small lesson, it is: switch off the meaning centers of your brain, enhance the sound centers, and follow along),

Shield of the enwebbed dryopithecene, this branchiating autumn,

God is the tomb in creation, a voi dance knotting

in the air two leaves,

bound,

for the great fast, syncretion, a binding fast, to step… (“Clarksville, October, 1979”)

just plain sounds great. And no matter what your ninth grade English teacher told you, that's what poetry is all about, how the syllables all come together to sound good.