Reciprocal Distillations

by Clayton Eshleman

Poetry. Foreword by Roberto Tejada. "Image density is the salient feature that renders poetic space distinct in Clayton Eshleman's animation of a language that allows for thick terms of concentration and complex shadings. This is to speak ofdegrees that extend back and forth, from comic-strip plain form, in emphatic warps of surface effect, to the half-light and roundedness of things no more than partially disclosed as heretofore sealed inside a cave; and this should come as no surprise from a writer who for over forty years in a commitment to poetry and intellectual life has thought intensely about history and its various objects, counting those we differentiate as art"--Roberto Tejada, from the foreword.

73 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2007

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

[C Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reciprocal Distillations is the second book of Eshleman’s own poetry to appear since he published his lifelong translation project of the great Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. Each poem in Reciprocal Distillations is written in response to a visual artist, a practice that Eshleman has engaged frequently since his 1967 book Walks. Using a density of image that supplements the act of viewing, whether a Henry Darger panel (“No matter how many carnivores he releases, / the Vivian Girls are trillion in a field.”); or a classic Caravaggio, each poem produces an indelible image of the original. Eshleman’s language in response to the visual is an intense and sometimes playful distillation of experience.