ELYSSA GAGE
Staff Writer
A masterful fusion of a poet’s fantasies, a man’s beliefs and a scholar’s knowledge. That is what Clayton Eshleman brings his readers in “An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire.”
Raised in Indiana, Eshleman spent the first years of his career excavating who he was. The answer came to him in a most unexpected setting: the Ice Age caves of the French Dordogne. Eshleman soon discovered that the caves, which date to the Upper Paleolithic (between 10,000 and 35,000 years ago), had never been truly explored and used by a poet.
For the next 30 years, he researched on one hand and on the other fantasized in the caves, bringing the two together in his book “Juniper Fuse,” the work he states to be the “most ambitious” of his life as well as the most defining. He views his submersion in the Upper Paleolithic as a “big release.”
His recent publication, “The Alchemist with One Eye on Fire,” does not, as “Juniper Fuse” does, have one overlaying theme. Reading it is comparable to traveling across a man’s dreams: weaving in and out of consciousness and rationality. And then suddenly awakening in a place the reader would rather never see, an “Iraqi Morgue” for instance. In this specific poem, Eshleman brings you face to face with realities our society may like to cast aside. “0070 64 F04 is sad,” he writes. No name, no identity, but a face that brings reality: “looking up to the right / cheeks bulging.”
Another aspect of Eshleman’s career also appears in this book when he uses Spanish, as another of his recent accomplishments is the translation of “The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo.” Besides that, he has an impressive list of translations to his name, both of Spanish and French poets.
Eshleman describes his view on poetry in the introduction to the book: “Poetry, then,” he writes, “is about the extending of human consciousness, making conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in its finest moments overcomes all the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally, it seems, enmeshed.”
“The Alchemist with One Eye on Fire” represents this view on two levels: revealing the poet’s own psychic unconsciousness, as well as that of the society surrounding the poet.
On this last level, Eshleman puts the reader’s political beliefs on the spot, emphasizing in the introduction his freedom of speech, as well as in the poem “Dead Reckoning” in which he states: “Government will have no control over my imagination. / At the very least, the poem will be / a plumb line coiling into cessation, / a momentary dissolution of lunar dread.”
He describes himself as a “maniac allowed to wander about screaming ‘fire’ in a theater of the deaf,” and, giving the title to the book: “a late-nineteenth-century alchemist, mixing and cooking my potions in a Prague apartment – an alchemist with one eye on fire from what he know is going on outside his laboratory.”
He skillfully brings the war in Iraq home for the readers by simply moving the action to Lake Como, Italy: “Can I imagine Como carpet-bombed?” he writes, “No – but I can’t imagine 40,000 / dead in Iraq either.” And calls his readers to examine their beliefs: “Believe that a life, a community, could flourish somewhere, without / American intervention.”
As he states in his introduction, as Americans, we do not have the same vision of Uncle Sam as the rest of the world does. However, Eshleman strives to moderate his writing from both point of views: “ I keep both sides of Sam’s body in mind as I continue to work on myself, to learn, and to love.”
He also considers the role of poetry through all the world events: “The testimony is caught, a phantom, between the exploding body, news, / and being here.”
However, the dream-like poet’s unconscious was sometimes a more difficult read as much of it is inspired from specific works of literature and art such as Jean LaPlanche’s “Seduction, Translation, Drives,” or watercolors by Mary Heebner. The poems may have more meaning for those familiar with the works themselves. Others seem simply bizarre and have a particular style that surely will not be to everyone’s liking.
04-23-2007