Cleaving

Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts, 2005

John Olson Review of My Devotion, poems by Clayton Eshleman. 2004, Black Sparrow Books, Boston. 123 pages. $16.95. The word 'devotion' is an exponent of the deeply personal. It is more than love or affection--it is a purchase on the sublime. It is transcendent. It is the keystone in an arch of exaltation. It sounds silly in the mouth of a teenager. But in the mouth of someone over 60 it embarrasses us a little with its lambent sincerity. It acquires the weight of reality. It shakes with the light of veneration. It is wound with the fiber of experience so that it cannot be mere giddy emotion. It is the real deal. Eshleman`s work in this new collection is, indeed, the real deal. It is also highly unique, a species of work outside Eshleman's usual concerns with the underworld, the Ice Age caverns of southern France and northern Spain, the "dark embryo" of the unconscious aroused by the pulse of primal energies, ancient rites and powerful desires, ghosts, spirits, ancestors, souls, daimones. These concerns have not, by any means, been abandoned, but inform the work as chemosynthesis, an imbuing or residue - "the stain of the real" - not as a primary thrust. The poems comprising the bulk of this work (a few continue to be addressed to Ice Age topics) are frank disclosures of reverence and feeling for his wife Caryl and friends who have been lost to cancer or imperiled by mental disorder. They exist in the glaring light of the twentieth and twenty-first century. "Shopping," for instance, takes us on a trip through a department store during Christmas, the "crematorial sensation in a department store, thousands of suits and dresses without bodies, as if it is always Book 11 of The Odyssey. "Inside Caryl's Left Shoulder" is an astonishingly good poem. It chronicles, in remarkably vivid detail, a process of arthroscopic surgery preserved on video. The poem is structured in sentences and small paragraphs separated by blank space. This discreteness enhances a concentrated focus on each image, or episode, of the surgical process. "The debrider now a kind of monster in a feeding frenzy." "Blobs of bloody tissue stream the video screen." "Feathery tissue flurries." "The mowing of Caryl's ocean floor." Eshleman has long had a fine knack for relating details of the everyday to more cosmic or mythical actualities of our deep ancestral past. This enables him to create a deeply personal work that in no way becomes smarmy or confessional. It is always linked to universals. Our "Uroboric carousel."

1989

Open Book Publishers, 2013

Plates 1. Between pp. 25-26, Yeats's holograph revision to 'The Sorrow of Love' tipped in to Lady Gregory's copy of Poems (1895) and misdated, probably by her, in the Robert W. Woodruff Collection, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. 2. Between pp. 25-26, Yeats's holograph revision in another of Lady Gregory' s copies of Poems, that of 1904, also now in the Woodruff Collection at Emory and altered in 1924 as marked in pencil. This slip is pasted onto a torn-off printed slip bearing a part of line 10, almost certainly from an uncorrected proof of Early Poems and Stories (1925). 3. Between pp. 25-26, top board of Lady Gregory's white and gold copy of Poems (1904) now in the Robert W. Woodruff Collection, Emory. 4. Between pp. 25-26, close-up of the tipped-in revisions in Plates 1 and 2. 5. Facing p. 40, W. B. Y. listening to Homer', undated (c. 1887), by Jack B. Yeats, pasted into a copy of The Wind Among the Reeds (1900), in the Woodruff Collection, Emory. 6. Facing p. 45, Yeats's holograph revisions in the setting copy of 'The Adoration of the Magi' for Early Poems and Stories (1925). Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 7. Facing p. 105, Thoor Ballylee, cottage in ruin, river and bridge, a pen and ink drawing by A. Norman Jeffares, 17 x 22.5 cm, private collection. This drawing was the basis of a chapter tailpiece vignette in W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (London: Routledge, 1949). 8. Facing p. 108, 'Mrs W. B. Yeats', by Edmund Dulac, exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, London, June 1920, in the possession of the Yeats family, photograph by Nicola Gordon Bowe. All Dulac images © x Marcia Geraldine Anderson, courtesy Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. 9. Between pp. 108-09, Robert Gregory's design of the 'Charging Unicorn' first used on the title-page of Discoveries (1907). Private Collection. 10. Between pp. 108-09, Gustave Moreau, 'Les Licornes' (c. 1885), an unfinished oil on canvas in the Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, and based on the 15 th century tapestries then recently acquired by the Musée de Cluny, Paris (see Plate 12). Photographer unknown. 11. Between pp. 108-09, 'Monoceros de Astris' by Thomas Sturge Moore, title-page of Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1915). Private Collection. 12 Between pp. 108-09, Bookplate for George Yeats by Thomas Sturge Moore, showing a round tower struck by lightning, releasing a white unicorn, Senate House Library, University of London. 13. Between pp. 110-11, Red tapestry, 'La dame à la licorne', th century, Musée de Cluny, Paris. Photographer unknown, Public Domain. 14. Between pp. 110-11, 'Deer and Unicorn' wood-cut from The Book of Lambspring, as reproduced in A. E. Waite's The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged (London, James Elliott & Co., 1893). 15. Facing p. 117, Edmund Dulac's pastel caricature of Yeats, 1915, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, photographer unknown. 16. Facing p. 130, Edmund Dulac's 'The Good Chiron Taught His Pupils How to Play upon the Harp' in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918). Private Collection. 17. Between pp. 139-40, Edmund Dulac's woodcut of a unicorn in A Vision (1925). Private Collection, London. It also appeared on the title-page of Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends (1932), and in Last Poems and Two Plays (1939). Copies in Private Collection. 18. Between pp. 139-40, Charles Ricketts's endpapers for the 1920s Macmillan Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats. Private Collection. 19. Between pp. 139-40, Thomas Sturge Moore's 'Candle in Waves' sigil on the title-page of Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920). This emblem of 'the soul in the midst of the waters of the flesh or of time' also appeared in Seven Poems and a Fragment (1922) and October Blast (1927). Private Collection. 20. Between pp. 139-40, Yeats's bookplate, by Thomas Sturge Moore, showing the candle in waves motif above Sturge Moore's gates, his visual pun on the origins of Yeats's name in the Middle English and northern and north-midland dialectal word 'yeat' or 'yate' meaning 'gate', Senate House Library, University of London. 21. Facing p. 197, the biggest rookery in Europe at Buckenham Carr Woods, near Norwich, courtesy Jane Rusbridge, ©Natalie Miller. 22-24. Facing p. 242, three faces of Derry Jeffares, Unknown contemporary press photographers. Images courtesy of Colin Smythe Ltd. All rights reserved.

TEXT

is an award-winning writer, academic and critic. She has written eight books (with two more in progress) and has been awarded a Harvard Visiting Scholar¹s position from 2015-2016. atherton.com Blue twilight unfurls its splendour, a Didionesque gloaming for the lonely. I try to catch its tint in my cup, to taste its calm, but its inkiness spills over me until I am glass. Bathed in owl-light, I float on short blue wavelengths. I cannot be broken.

The Missouri Review, 2014

2012

In describing the lace-like structure of human experience, the extraordinary Irish poet and scholar John O’Donohue points to the frailty of the human interface with the eternal, but also to an unexpected notion: that it is the ruptures in our lives, the openings – punctured, trimmed, mended, and at times raw – that are the most sublime. The recent Pointure exhibition1 and colloquium2 ‘laced’ together a broad range of artworks and theoretical papers that relate to artistic acts of stitching and notional derivations of this material phenomenon. In retrospect I am convinced that many, if not all, of the works and papers represented at these related events are variable manifestations in thought and deed of these themes of human fragility. In these essays and artworks, the acts of stitching, pricking, suturing, tearing, rupturing, cutting, embroidering, appliquéing, grafting, spinning and weaving, and a myriad other incarnations of this practice of the ruptured mark, demonstrate and invo...

TEXT, 2014

Performance Research, 2023

Raegan Truax's Sloughing (San Francisco, 2017) is a durational performance during which thirty-five women and genderqueer individuals bleed on plywood boards in public. Performed over twenty-eight consecutive days, Sloughing confronts its viewer with a bleeding body unaccompanied by injury, wound or puncture. ‘A Period Piece that Endures: Twenty-eight reflections on Sloughing’ explores a choice and desire to bleed seeping into public consciousness. The article offers a poetic exchange between Truax and Sloughing performer, scholar Alexis Bard Johnson, which weaves together formal analysis, comparisons, reflections and interviews to ask: what is the value of making menstruation visible? How does menstrala art allow us to renegotiate our relationship to blood and its visibility? What feelings occur? What political work is possible? Attending to these questions, Truax and Johnson confront a range of views about the bleeding body, gender, protest, endurance, tactical performance, queer feminism and collective worldmaking during a time of heightened political organizing around bodily autonomy for women, trans, and genderqueer people in the United States.

2013

This thesis is composed of two parts: Hoard, a collection of poems, and Dark Lyrics: Studying the Subterranean Impulses of Contemporary Poetry, an inquiry into the metaphor of darkness in late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry. Hoard includes four series of poems-'Red Boat', 'Hoxne', 'Quatrefoils' and 'White Swan'-which use the Hoxne hoard as a metaphor for lost love. The second series is titled 'Foundlings', and is based on archival tokens from children who were abandoned to London's Foundling Hospital in the mid-eighteenth century. The third series includes 'Elegy' and 'Decorations', and uses descriptions of the Staffordshire hoard along with eyewitness accounts of global conflict in the late-twentieth century to the present day. Dark Lyrics: Studying the Subterranean Impulses of Contemporary Poetry examines the theme of loss presented in the poems Hoard, progressing from orphans to silenced women to bereavement to war to ecological disaster. The book is a series of mediations of a central topic and includes close readings that show how an individual contemporary writer uses the topic within his or her work. Meditation One posits that forms of loss appear in poetry as metaphors of darkness, and proceeds historically through the work of Dante, Shakespeare and Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Wright; the chapter ends with a close reading of John Burnside's prose poem 'Annunciations' (Common Knowledge). Meditation Two looks at the mythological uses of the concept of darkness, especially as it represents ego loss, and discusses Joan Retallack's 'Afterrimages'; the chapter closes with a discussion of Rusty Morrison's Whethering and when the true keeps calm biding its story. Meditation Three looks at the emotions of lost love, both familial and romantic, and includes a discussion of Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions and ethics. The chapter includes close readings of Elizabeth Robinson's The orphan and its relations and Susan Howe's That This. Meditation Four discusses the pain caused by war and the form of my long poem 'Decorations'; it includes an examination of Seamus Heaney's North. The chapter concludes with an essay on Maxine Chernoff's book Without. Meditation Five discusses objects and how they become a part of the body and therefore become a potential locus for both pain and loss; the chapter closes with a close reading of Brenda Coultas' The Handmade Museum. The themes and ideas are reiterated in the Conclusion.