CENOTE
# 5, Penetralia book cover image by
Mary Heebner,
1989
collage with pastel, pigment and canvas on Stonehenge rag paper
Clayton
Eshleman
Black
Widow Press, 2017
ISBN:
978-0-9971725-8-4
5.9
x 0.6 x 9 inches
176 pages
176 pages
$19.95
Penetralia:
Eshleman Inside & Out
A Review of Clayton
Eshleman’s Penetralia By Nathan
Spoon
According to the OED, the word penetralia
means “the innermost parts of a building; a secret or hidden place.” Clayton
Eshleman, who recently turned 82, has taken this word as the title of his
newest collection of poems touching on themes including mask, violation, myth,
psychospirituality, conspiracy theory and more, intertwined with poems and
passages nostalgically recalling or addressing beloved poets, persons, himself
and his wife and editor, Caryl.
*
“Reface me. / Deliver me from this shotgun
blast mess,” Eshleman writes in the prayerful opening lines of his opening poem
“For Connie Culp.” As we learn from both the poem and an endnote, this is a
powerful real-life story. Ms. Culp, after being shot in the face with a
12-gauge by her husband, went on to become, in 2008, the first U.S. recipient
of a face transplant. In contrast to the cruel act perpetrated by her husband,
is the healing and restorative refacing performed by surgeon Maria Siemionow
who led a team of eight doctors in a 22 hour operation, replacing more than
3/4ths of Ms. Culp’s face “with that of Anna Kasper’s, her donor.” Eshleman
plays with sensitive details as he asks, “Will her soul reject her mask?”
*
The act of being shot in the face with a
12-gauge by one’s husband is also an extreme human-to-human violation. In these
poems, Eshleman explores this theme in various other ways, including rape and
warfare. “Oil Spill” (13 May 2010) addresses, in an explosion of color and
texture, human-to-nature violation. “Dolphins,” “islands,” “pebbles,”
“marshes,” “waves” and the “roan static sea” itself are all colored and
slickened into “beauty-lewd eco-horror,” until we arrive at the poem’s coda,
which weaves the concrete and the abstract, the real and the mythic together:
Oil slick containing in its lavender gloss
a black tree-like configuration:
Olson’s 1968 eaten-out World Tree? Update:
Tree rotted through, its flattened
saurian ghost spreading.
For how brief it is, “Oil Spill” holds
more than it seems to on a first, a second or even a third reading. It has, as
does much of Olson’s work, an intense, slow burn impact.
The poem “Tree Roots and Trunks” (For
James Heller Levinson) combines self-to-self violation with the mythic. This
poem, which takes its title from a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, is set in
Auvers, in July, 1890. On the 26th of this month, the artist shot himself.
Eshleman describes Persephone as being in command of “Vincent’s brush hand, /
drawing him down to confront the fusion, / never achieved in painting.” The
first line of the second quatrain finishes out the idea, “Her clitoris, when he
dared to touch, felt triggerish.” This poem plunges headlong into the
Eleusinian Mysteries of a troubled and creative mind, “A blue corm with three
lidless eyes was staring at him, / a face now masked with twigs.” The artist
wonders, “am I just like a planet, or a paralyzed star?” The poem replies that
both artist and art are “Vaginal blast of the son shot back.”
*
Yorunomado is a mythic totem character who
carries over from previous works by Eshleman. In this collection, Yorunomado
first appears in its second poem “Posthumous Mask,” and then again in its
fourth poem “Mandalizing,” (comprised of four letters to Anne Waldman) in which
the poet explains, “I constructed my own guide, Yorunomado, out of the name of
a coffee shop where I translated in the afternoon (Yorunomado = Night Window),
& a… photo of a Sepika Delta head hunter sitting on a reed bench looking at
a skull.” The poet created this character at a moment when he was unable to
move forward with his translations of Vallejo. Thankfully, Yorunomado guided
him forward in a visionary way then and continues to do so now.
*
“Mandalizing,” a reflection on the soul,
also contains the aspect of psychospirituality and is impressive for the way it
brings together Iranian Sufi Gnosticism, Tibetan Buddhism and Jungianism.
Eshleman is bookish poet in the best sense. His knowledge of these various
psychospiritual realms is obviously considerable, and still he never seems to
make a merely decorative reference and, in the glut that is a hallmark of his
work, he never overwhelms. Bookish reference after bookish reference clearly
remains the material the poet is using to write what are clearly poems. This
poem also demonstrates how textual appropriation, which is a method Eshleman
uses throughout Penetralia, can be
used artistically.
Visionary imagination prevails in a number
of these poems. The final lines of “The Eye Mazes of Unica Zurn” provide a
striking example of Eshleman’s visionary poetics, even as they touch on both
vision and Zurn’s visionary artwork:
I watch Unica pupilize, puppetize, then
flea bait her range.
I note the rotary palimpsest of all men
inhabiting her facial levers,
motordrome cylinders on whose vertical
walls eyes cycle defying gravity. Moon of cratered nests
in which eye spiders drink her strength.
in which eye spiders drink her strength.
The image of the face/facial is present
once again in these lines, while words such as “rotary,” “cylinder,” “cycle”
and “moon,” not to mention “eyes/eye,” all drive the idea of roundedness.
*
“Wound Interrogation” offers an example of
how most of the above-mentioned themes can be intertwined with conspiracy
theory and transformed into poetry. This poem (which first appeared in X-Peri, January 10, 2016) also takes its
title from a painting by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta. The conspiracy
theory referenced here is, at this point, a common enough one about “The suppression
of the horrifying truth of the 9/11 assault (more appropriately referred to as
“The Pentagon Three Towers Bombing”).” In Eshleman’s estimation, this event
“is, like an undiagnosed plague, lodged in the American subconscious.” All of
this emerges in startling contrast to the precise imagery and extensive and
deep knowledge found throughout these pages. Does the poet have a truly
visionary insight into 9/11, which has certainly wounded the American
soul?
*
For all the wide-ranging and intense subject
matter the poems in Penetralia
contain, this is by no means a disjointed or despairing collection. Two years
after the publication of Clayton
Eshleman: Essential Poetry (1960-2015), this poet is doing more than
avoiding sentimentalism and the hazards often associated with late nostalgic
recollection. His work continues to be visionary and vital. Eshleman is
unmistakably adding to his essential oeuvre and inviting his readers into “the
innermost parts,” the “secret or hidden place” of Poetry.
