In this, the first full-length study of Clayton Eshleman's poetry, poet and scholar Paul Christensen descends into the torch-lit underworld, the cave of the soul, that Eshleman has been exploring in his work for more than three decades. "In the caves of Dordogne, " Christensen writes, "Eshleman discovered an underworld in actuality, a labyrinth in which Paleolithic humanity daubed and slashed their marks, their primordial psychic images." He also found a controlling metaphor for all his mature poetry: "For Eshleman, these markings were a first language, and they represent the primal separation between sleep and waking, " between the darkness of pre-consciousness and the light of self-awareness, between the amoral animal (which simply "is") and the guilty man (who is tortured by the realization "I am").