Strata

2016

MultiMedia Publishing, 2014

Introduction in poetry: nature of poetry, tools, history, terms (periods, styles and movements, technical means, tropes, measures of verse, verse forms, national poetry... Poetry is traditionally a written art form (although there is also an ancient and modern poetry which relies mainly upon oral or pictorial representations) in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. The increased emphasis on the aesthetics of language and the deliberate use of features such as repetition, meter and rhyme, are what are commonly used to distinguish poetry from prose, but debates over such distinctions still persist, while the issue is confounded by such forms as prose poetry and poetic prose. Some modernists (such as the Surrealists) approach this problem of definition by defining poetry not as a literary genre within a set of genres, but as the very manifestation of human imagination, the substance which all creative acts derive from. ISBN 978-606-033-099-8

2001

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."

2014

1999

Quintessential Fine Books, 2021

Philosophical poetry on the human condition.

Besides the five formally accepted disciplines of Architecture, Urban Design, Conservation, Interior Design & Valuation, Kimaya has been active in the allied field of Education, Journalism, Environmental Activism, Photography, & Poetry. POETRY: The depth & width of one’s experience condition any expression. Several experiences & sensations of Kimaya have been expressed through verse. ‘Kimaya’, the Marathi essay by the late Prof. Madhav Achwal speaks about the word ‘Kimaya’ as a journey from the give & take of mundane everyday life to that of the most beautiful & complete consciousness. The aesthetic expression cuts across the media of architecture and all the ‘rasas’ – (aesthetic sensations) Kimaya has found poetry to be a useful medium for expressing the agonies & ecstasies in this journey. Several magazines have used these verses to express the inner meanings of the accompanying prose.