Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld

For over thirty years, Clayton Eshleman has studied the Ice Age cave art of southwestern France—Juniper Fuse is the culmination of this work. Named after the primitive hand lamp wicks used to light cave walls, the book, in Ronald Gottesman’s words, is “a fabulous three-dimensional tapestry of scholarship. Original and intense, it poses serious questions about human nature and its relation to the animal and natural worlds.”

Juniper Fuse is also a profound examination, in poetry and in prose, of the nature of poetic imagination and personal myth-making. Drawing upon art history and archaeology as well as poetics and personal experience, Eshleman delivers a potent distillation of the “paleoecology” of our minds, a provocative, and wholly passionate, exploration into the nature of consciousness.