Inspired by cave art Clayton Eshleman encountered in France, his poetry acts as a journey through his discovery process of what these paintings are to him, as well as a study of prehistory towards the Paleolithic and subsequently a study of Hell, and the Greek Underworld.
Eshleman himself says that “By beginning to look at Paleolithic cave art from the viewpoint of the simultaneous psychic organization and disintegration, I hope to be extending our sense of ‘gods’ and imaginative activity way beyond the Greeks, so that human roots may be seen as growing in a context that does not preclude the animal from a sense of the human.”