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."

Abstract As a poet and language educator, I am often asked, Is this a good poem?, as if I carry some kind of standard measuring device for assessing the value of poems. But, perhaps the important question is not, Is this a good poem?, but instead, What is a poem good for? So, in this paper, I offer five reasons why poetry is important for living.