Ben Estes, ABC Moonlight

 

With empathy as the cornerstone
of good design, let’s look there for meaning,
down into this sloping bowl of a field
funneling into my rainbow-painted tunnel.

Where was the nuance? (“Twelve Folded Poems”)

The latest from Kingston, New York poet, editor and publisher Ben Estes is ABC Moonlight (Kingston NY: The Song Cave, 2022), following the chapbooks Lamp like l’map (2009), Cymbals (2010), The Strings of Walnetto Arrangements (2011), and 8 Poems (2012) as well as his full-length debut, Illustrated Games of Patience (The Song Cave, 2015) [see where I mentioned such here]. Set in three sections—“Twelve Folded Poems,” “Sixteen Pickup Pocket Quarry” and “A Shadow Theater”—the collection opens with an alternating sequence of poems numbered “1” and “2,” flipping back and forth across twenty-four individual poems set in pairs. “There wasn’t yet a sun.” the third poem (and the second poem titled “1”) in the sequence offers, “The sky was still empty. // The man who did this job / before me could stand so quietly. // He could make a whistle from the seed of any fruit. / Once he made a kite out of newspaper // and he told stories about the stars, and about the earth. / He told them to pass the night, // and because his heart was a reflection / in the soul of the world.” The poems offer a binary that evades easy narrative, turning in on itself even as it progresses. And yet, Estes’ poems, both in this particular sequence and throughout the collection, display a cadence of ease even across longing and heartbreak, through repetition and rhythm, almost held as a metronome tic of accumulation and pinpoint accuracy. Or, as the opening poem to the opening sequence reads, in full:

Dear Nature,
did love make me?

Estes’ accumulations shape and form narrative out of a sequence of pinpoints, reminiscent (in form, at least) to the work of Philadelphia poet ryan eckes, or even across the work of the late American poet Robert Creeley: one phrase following and threading immediately after and upon another. As Estes writes near the end of the second section/sequence: “with you this life who // as a kid thought // could be ours you & me // in the world riding alongside // everything but all of it up broken // in my life I could never // admit equal to everything // I had taken or been given ever since [.]” Estes manages subtle moments and phrases, some of which rattle, others that sink deep in the skin. In many ways, this is a book-length tryptich on longing and heartbreak, loss and recollection, attempting to clarify and document the threads of how one gets from there to here, composing long stretches of narrative across what might be described as a thousand individual accumulated and finely-hewn points. “before your things,” he writes, “were gone i guess // you had too much // else to say in order // to say goodbye [.]”

 

Notes on (some) books I haven’t had time to properly discuss:

I’m remarkably behind, in ways you can’t even imagine. Here are some scattered notes of reviews begun but never fully fleshed out. And yet, these are all books I thought were interesting. Must I wait until Aoife begins school in another, what, three or four years? (Answer: probably).

The Essential D.G. Jones, selected by Jim Johnstone: I’ve known that The Essential D.G. Jones (The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 2016) was in the works for some time, and was pleased to know of it, although I’d hoped that there might have been another books’ worth of material that Jones was sitting on. I’d been months gently prodding him to allow me to produce another chapbook (after the one we did in 2002); despite the fact that he occasionally sent me unpublished poems in the mail that he would allow me to produce in a variety of venues (including dusie and Touch the Donkey), it was the only part of my letters he wouldn’t respond to. I envy Johnstone’s ability to work on such a project, even if not the fact that this becomes a “last collection” for the late poet [see my obituary for him here]. Jones truly was one of our finest lyric poets and as Johnstone writes in his introduction: “The Essential D.G. Jones is the first volume of selected poetry to span the poet’s entire career.”

Suddenly

a flock, a body, the birds

moving, moving the air, moving

the bank behind the house, the snow

sieved by sun and rain, the

seeds, the fallout from trees, hedge

a feeder

            nervous, a percentage of feathers

lift off, sheer off, a percentage

arrive, others remain, picking their

way, a jittery wave of scavengers, cleaners

over the snow

the body of spring emerges

the body of winter emerges

the body of spring, engages

feathers and debris

Ben Estes, Illustrated Games of Patience: Massachusetts poet Ben Estes’ first full-length poetry collection, Illustrated Games of Patience (The Song Cave, 2015), is a sharp and witty combination of straight lyric and prose poem. There was a subtlety here that I liked, that drew me back into this collection even after I’d put the book down.

A Rainbow Sign

I just don’t think that

this is what it’s supposed to feel like,

shaking my big one to break the stream

and make a pool for moving my tools,

for they weigh only half as much

when moved under water.

I emerged in the morning, covered in blood and fine acid sand

and decided to remain partially submerged a little while longer.

Itching for more exercise,

and cooled not by water but by air,

I spent the afternoon collecting sea shells,

and found each one heavily carved

with the numbers of pretty village girls

offering to take tourists to the ultimate level.

A spring and summer service they offer.

I meant to call one, with a headline ready on my lips,

but a gull would dive down wheeling and screaming

each time I tried to dial.

One can fool the animals,

but must forgive this wild, beautiful country.