The Aranea Constellation

Clayton Eshleman

Clayton Eshleman has been working on a very large project for very many years dealing with his favorite subject, cave paintings. He weaves into it literary criticism and personal reminiscence. The Aranea Constellation, a 1998 chapbook from the press arm of the Rain Taxi Review of Books (www.raintaxi.com), which is rapidly becoming a major force in the world of poetry chapbooks. (The magazine's pretty cool, too.)

As with most large, multi-volume pieces of criticism that take decades to write, one can expect a good deal of disjointedness in the writing. The Aranea Constellation is set up almost like a journal, with reminiscences about Eshleman drinking with Joanne Kyger in 1963 butting up against pieces about Theseus going into the maze to kill the Minotaur (and how the story symbolizes the attempt of man to conquer his own bestial nature) to reflective pieces about a red spider that used to live in Eshleman's backyard to, of course, cave paintings and speculations about ancient rites of initiation.

Eshleman's prose style, like his poetic style, is brilliant, and that combined with the brevity of this chapbook make it a stronger thing that it would otherwise be. One can revel in the language Eshleman uses and simply enjoy the little snatches, or one can delve into the heart of the thing and take a good look at how it all connects. (This is not surprising; it's a more lucid prose form of surrealism, that lovely poetic subgenre which for many years Eshleman has been the only practitioner of worth reading.) One surmises that were the whole four hundred pages of this fragmentary manuscript publiched all at one, it might well wear thin; twenty-four pages of it, however, is a joy.