"What is missing?" The question echoes throughout a sprawling collection. For this poet, our present age is marked by an absurd level of cruelty and violence; and poetry, if it is to address that at all, must rise to the same frenetic level. As he points out, "Look what men do to women. Why should art be less?" With such an intent in mind, one might anticipate a certain amount of moralizing. But Clayton Eshleman gives the collection a refreshingly bizarre array of imagery through which incidents like the Bosnian civil war are viewed.
Eshleman is a reverse prophet, returning to 13,000 B.C. to crouch in a cave of ancient paintings and describe our world on the wall.