ABC Moonlight

In ABC Moonlight, Ben Estes holds the reader in a dreamlike trance with lines like “Baby-clean daisy-colored clouds,” before breaking the spell with a literal catalog of dreams. The collection opens with “Twelve Folded Poems,” a set of poems that examine how memory might shape the understanding of a self, how we search for meaning in the images that our minds hold even as they are shredded and recycled by our subconscious. Thus, for example, the image of clouds gives ways to a question, and the thought process that ensues:

How does one draw a rainbow?
It’s the impending death
and rebirth of humankind that
bends the air’s iridescent edge.

To read these poems is to be immersed in sensory-rich language play. We observe “native prairies / blackened and bleached” and experience the synesthesia of “[a] noise / the color of the air.” The melancholy that thrums just beneath the surface of these poems is brought to the fore through idiosyncratic syntax, as when we learn that “[t]he world can be so difficult to do.” The freshness of Estes’s imagery comes through in particular when metaphor is charged with revising itself:

the hang gliders fly, as if
they were perfume sprayed into the air.
After a dozen trips,
those big sleepy flowers
lay where they fell

I enjoyed the associative mechanics these poems draw on, but in the final section, “A Shadow Theater,” a lack of context made the poems difficult to get inside of. Its mysterious cast of characters felt unrelatable (“C. begins making these strange visual tricks … / B. … seems oddly smug”). Elsewhere, the dreamscapes the poet conjures—of walking from roof to roof, for example, “the way old plague nurses / used to do, visiting their patients”—fall apart when the language itself veers too closely to straightforward explication.  

Holding this book together is the deeply compelling and somewhat disorienting “Sixteen Pickup Pocket Quarry,” which traces a failed relationship over time. Estes has a way of making me want to peer into the gaps his work opens up in order to more fully grasp its rich fantasia of images:

Now to let something go
of myself,
without any need
to replace it.