Minding the Underworld: Clayton Eshleman and Late Postmodernism

In this, the first full-length study of Clayton Eshleman’s poetry, poet and scholar Paul Christensen descends into the torch-lit underworld, the cave of the soul, that Eshleman has been exploring in his work for more than three decades. “In the caves of Dordogne,” Christensen writes, “Eshleman discovered an underworld in actuality, a labyrinth in which Paleolithic humanity daubed and slashed their marks, their primordial psychic images.” He also found a controlling metaphor for all his mature poetry: “For Eshleman, these markings were a first language, and they represent the primal separation between sleep and waking,” between the darkness of pre-consciousness and the light of self-awareness, between the amoral animal (which simply “is”) and the guilty man (who is tortured by the realization “I am”).