Customer Reviews

Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoon

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The second poem in John Estes' fine collection "Breakfast with Blake at the Lacoon," entitled "Prayer in the Study of Art," includes these lines:

In your writing of icons,
Where you in theory
No longer exist; in the face,
The image becomes a likeness
And color and shape graft
Us to forms worth following.

I bought the collection because of those lines and that poem alone. But there was much more to come.

Estes' poems evoke a sense of the literary and a sense of everyday reality. He ranges from Virgil to a one-armed, drunken grandfather, from the art of Brueghel to a divorced man at a family barbeque. My favorite in this collection is the poem entitled "The last rites of Pavel Florensky," a narrative of the death of the Russian theologian, inventor, philosopher and engineer in the Soviet Gulag in 1937. From that poem:

Maybe while developing
some intercepted samizdat,
hovered around as purple
vapors betrayed him -
self-evident to his enemies
even in ink, ink cloaked
by an invisible hand -
the troika damned him
for those relatively obscure
sentences on the physics
of the kingdom of God,
or for positing an icon
recalls eternity where a poem
recalls times or worse -
for proving it with numbers.

Legend says that Florensky was condemned for refusing to disclose the hiding place of the head of St. Sergii Radonezhsky. No proof for that, of course, but it makes a good story, and a truly fine poem, one of many in "Breakfast with Blake at the Lacoon."