Sunday, April 18, 2010

Anticline - by Clayton Eshleman

One of the epigraphs to Clayton Eshleman's remarkable new book is from Mulla Sadra via Henry Corbin's Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth :

"Of all the realities that man sees and contemplates in the world beyond, those which delight, like houris, castles, gardens, green vegetation, and steams of running water - as well as their opposites - the horrifying kinds of which Hell is composed - none of these is extrinsic to him, to the very essence of his soul, none is distinct or separated from his own act of existing." Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth, 165

Eshleman at Poets.org
Sulfur Journal Homepage (Interview on the ending of  Sulfur)

Kenneth Warren in his recent review of Grindstone for The Denver Quarterly writes: "For roughly half a century, Clayton Eshleman has embraced, like nobody else in American poetry, a massive practice of self-creating engagement with emotionally stirring artists, poets and psychologists. By way of editing, lecturing, teaching, translating, travelling, and writing, Eshleman has formed an interdisciplinary body of work, which through complex relationship with others feeds and radiates a powerfully realized madcap love for the rough and tumble of human experience, imagination, and instincts." 


"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

A very fine and interesting review here

See more on Anticline at Black Widow Press

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