An Anatomy Of The Night by Clayton Eshleman

An Anatomy Of The Night by Clayton Eshleman is a magnificent new work by one of America’s foremost poets. In thirty-one parts written between December 2010 and February 2011, Eshleman’s long poem creates a choral effect that masterfully evokes fragments of candid observation shimmering in rhythmic intensity. In bold simplicities, illustrative sensibilities and lyrical integrity this work is imaginative, intimate and beautifully controlled. Hauntingly, these poems rip open the space of the long form poem and create something new and brilliant.

From An Anatomy Of The Night by Clayton Eshleman

     [16]

          Imaginal love

          incorrigibly infected by violence,

                         the damnation strut in the human,

          fuse of extinction      formless horizon:

                  now the daily telepathy

          I listen to Caryl breathe.

                             Why cannot her being

          bless the world?  Bless it to awaken from the doomcraft

                                    that is religion—

          The dark sloughs its “d” and the ark of dawn,

          first in my heart, then in the fuzzy edge of the window        

             blind,

          reveals Caryl’s recumbent profile.

          Blind edge, road of awe, world axis that allows me to

                 contemplate her breathing.

___________
Other recent comments on Clayton Eshleman’s work inculde:

“This scrupulously edited selection [Grindstone of Rapport] of poems, critical prose and translation represents more than forty 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.”

 —excerpt from Publishers Weekly 1/19/2009 (Starred review)

“Nobody is like him in a struggle. With ornery stubbornness, Clayton Eshleman has kept visiting the dark occasions, and brought back for us poems unlike anybody else’s. At times he makes the wildness of most poetry seem merely effete. I know of no poet who has fed so richly from the thingliness of the world beneath his feet, none who so resists the glamour of beliefs. He is a shaman without a single superstition.”

—Robert Kelly

“How to contain the uncontainable? The Grindstone of Rapport provides a generous sample of the red energies of Clayton Eshleman’s writing, boiling over the limits of language within the space of a single volume. Shape-shifting like a trickster-animal, Eshleman’s poetic genius has always translated, by means of transgressive imagination, the darkest brightest drives of the primal body. And with this comprehensive selection, the magnitude of Eshleman’s achievement comes into view: here are definitive voicings of Artaud, Césaire, and Vallejo; here too, the original poetry and prose of Clayton Eshleman joins the ranks of these totems of the world-spirit. What you hold is not a book but a labyrinth, not a labyrinth but a web, at whose ‘perilous center’ vibrates the spider-mind of a major American writer.”

––Andrew Joron

Clayton Eshleman’s most recent publications include The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007), The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black Widow Press, 2008), Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010), Solar Throat Slashed (a translation of Aimé Césaire’s Soleil cou coupé, with A. James Arnold, Wesleyan University Press, 2011), and Endure (a selected translations of Bei Dao, with Lucas Klein, Black Widow Press, 2011). Eshleman is the first poet to realize a huge, researched, and imaginative project, in prose and poetry, on Ice Age cave art: Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). He was also the founder and editor of Caterpillar magazine (1967-1973) and Sulfur magazine (1981-2000). He continues to live with his wife Caryl in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 68 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-095-0

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