Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld

by Clayton Eshleman

For over thirty years, Clayton Eshleman has studied the Ice Age cave art of southwestern France―Juniper Fuse is the culmination of this work. Named after the primitive hand lamp wicks used to light cave walls, the book, in Ronald Gottesman's words, is "a fabulous three-dimensional tapestry of scholarship. Original and intense, it poses serious questions about human nature and its relation to the animal and natural worlds."

Juniper Fuse is also a profound examination, in poetry and in prose, of the nature of poetic imagination and personal myth-making. Drawing upon art history and archaeology as well as poetics and personal experience, Eshleman delivers a potent distillation of the "paleoecology" of our minds, a provocative, and wholly passionate, exploration into the nature of consciousness.

Genres: Poetry, History, Anthropology

356 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 2003

About the author

Eshleman is an American poet, translator, and editor.

Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He and José Rubia Barcia jointly prepared The Complete Posthumous Poetry of César Vallejo (1978) and won the U.S. National Book Awardin category Translation. He has also translated books by Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith), Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador.

Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the period, Caterpillar and Sulfur.

Sometimes he is mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg, including: Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Kenneth Irby, Robert Kelly, Jed Rasula, Gustaf Sobin, and John Taggart. He is now Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry, image, art criticism, confession--a fascinating, bumpy piece of hybrid commentary on cave art and the beginnings of human consciousness. How many PhD candidates get to write a line like this in their dissertation without completely compromising their authority: "Then, in 1969, on my back, naked, under the scrutinizing eyes of my Reichian therapist, Dr. Sidney Handelman, clothed, on a chair beside me, I was lured into a babylike game: He leaned over me making baby faces and sounds--I responded, and soon we were gurgling at each other. A desire to suck his nose broke through my play, and I told him so."

Eshleman works some weird magic in getting us to accept this as just another part of our crawl down to the primitive roots of making/marking/etc.

[Gyrus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eshleman set out, in the seventies, to do what Charles Olson called a “saturation job” on the French caves: experiencing them as a poet and scholar, over several decades, and reporting back. This is his report. More: http://dreamflesh.com/library/clayton...

[Possum P · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked what I read but the author is obsessed with doodoo and vaginas so I had to just let it go.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.twincitiesbookfestival.com...