From Scratch - Softcover

Eshleman, Clayton

3.62

8 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1574230700 ISBN 13: 9781574230703

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press, 1998

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From Scratch is a suite of sinewy new poems, each exploring a station on one poet's way toward self-creation. Here is the growth of Clayton Eshleman's creative psyche from mud-caked Midwestern taproot to mature cosmopolitan flower, from inchoate youth to subtle mythologist of the caveman and of Paleolithic consciousness ("a single smoking road runs from Indianapolis to Lascaux!"). Here are hymns of praise for the great image-makers of the late Ice Age and to their modern descendants (Soutine, de Kooning, Nora Jaffe); here too are tributes to the master-spirits of the poet's inner life (Blake, Vallejo, Artaud).

Eshleman's is a highly individual poetry, yet one that demonstrates how each of us belongs, not just to our self, but also to those numberless selves who've gone before and to the collective human consciousness that underlies all our thoughts.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Eshleman's latest is a mixed bag: three long poems focus on the artists Nora Jaffe and Chaim Soutine, and the poet Antonin Artaud; several shorter ones contemplate Upper Paleolithic cave art; others ponder works by de Kooning or take inspiration from Blake's heroism. (Eshleman appends 10 pages of endnotes to explain all of his influences and borrowings.) There's much to admire in their eclecticism, sheer expressive energy and stretches of musicality, but Eshleman's main tendency in this 13th collection is toward excess: poems dart among subjects and digressions, turn diarylike in their ramblings, and plunge into nearly numbing description, particularly of paintings. Some will wonder whether Eshleman's eagerness to document his sensibility has left him too little time for revision, but that may be the point here. In defending his endnotes (one of the book's most entertaining sections) Eshleman disparages "a purist vision of the poem as a kind of mystical flower without a stem, rootwork, or dirt." The reader appreciates a glimpse into the workings of this poet's inspiration, but may not be willing to venture far into the muck. Still, the intermittent "killed-out image/ the sensation of a plunging rise,/ a fall so total it swerved into ascent" will be enough incentive for others. (Sept.) journal.

Review:

"One is tempted to think of Eshleman as the H. P. Lovecraft of postmodernist poetry. His images possess a disquieting sense of actuality, of being alive. They are not, however, merely sensationalistic effects but are symptoms of a state of mind, incarnations of psychic events. The anguish and ecstasies of an unquenchable thirst for more life, of a depth psychology based on an archetypal perspective. A movement out of ego into psyche. A movement out of the egg of circumscribed subjectivity into the timeless labyrinths of the underworld." --John Olson, American Book Review

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