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Kingdom Come

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In 2009, poet John Estes published a chapbook entitled "Breakfast with Blake at the Lacoon," which effectively evoked a sense of both the literary and everyday reality. That same characteristic is true of his first collection of poems, Kingdom Come: Poems, published by CR Press, but even more so: Estes is refining his art, honing and polishing his poems to create a mirrored reflection of ourselves.

The poems are structured in four sections and an interlude: "in which love and art seek their measure;" "in which he marries;" "in which a child is conceived and born;" the interlude called "Home Cosmographies;" and "in which they seek the measure of art and love." This structure is important, suggesting both a circular movement and well as development and growth, a filling out of a life that is young and new and beginning to mature.

It's fascinating to see how Estes combines images and even realities, using each to highlight and frame the other. In "A List of What is Found," for example, he tells a story of traveling to Kansas to conduct an inventory of a bookstore, an inventory framed by an old train rail bed and which in turns frames what's on the news:

A List of What Is Found

The old Burlington

Northern rail bed touches

the southern edge

of the yard

not a hundred feet

from where we're staying--

a ghostly, trackless

river of gray gravel

embowered by cottonwood

and hedge, thickened

with pines and red cedar.

Our hosts tell us--

as two wrens zip around

rebuilding their

poorly placed

nest the Doberman

ate babies-and-all--

how an easterly wind would

blow the approaching

rumble off and so a throbbing

hulk of diesel engine

towing 100+ coal cars

could suddenly darken

their back deck,

a paracletic comfort

(in retrospect, at least)

abandoned for a bike trail.

I've come to Kansas

to do a job,

to inventory a store of books--

the endangered kind

housed in old Victorians

where light switches

hide behind Kierkegaard

and the bathroom is

a stockroom stockpiling

stacks of bargain-buy lectures

on Aquinas on Aristotle,

titles they account for

in years per turn

not turns per year--

which means forsaking books

to better address

the shelf-worn menace

of our bourgeois

contentment.

An old copy of Thoreau

sits on the stand

calling out alongside

other diluted (i.e., textual)

libidinal oppositions:

bloodless

and rational words

of institution

that mock a project's

scope and scale

but safeguard a life,

so designed, of convention.

On the news:

in the desert outskirts

of an Iraqi town,

the so-called Triangle of Death,

a patrol is ambushed:

five dead--

3389, 3390, 3391, 3392, 3393--

three unaccounted for.

Our host descends

to remind us over 3000 die

worldwide each day

in car crashes.

Estes write from his own experience, and that experience is easily recognizable - the husband, the father, the handyman, the house repairman, the guy dealing hail damage to his roof and car or taking out an insurance policy on his child. In "This Poem is Carbon Neutral," Estes addresses what it means to be a neighbor, suggesting a kind of trade-off akin to Frost and his "good friends make good neighbors:"

This Poem Is Carbon Neutral

Across the street they think

we're eco-Kool-Aid drinkers: we sort glass and plastics

into blue bags, organics into clear ones, stuff

paper into paper sacks then treat

everything else like garbage.

But he thinks I'm a good neighbor,

and since we mend no fences I stop short of thinking

he's like Frost's old-stone savage

despite the Pall Malls

billowing with grandkids in the backseat,

windows up, despite the herbicide

and fungicide and fertilizer

liberally broadcast fall and spring. We wave

and shout news across the way though I suspect

he's deaf.

Otherwise our lifeworlds

barely intersect, our privacies mutually assured

except for now and again

when an egg is borrowed, or if the wind litters

his greensward with my recycling--

a magazine blow-in card or a pitched draft

or a crumpled receipt.

Once they walked across to inspect

then carried back a worn-out bookshelf we'd discarded.

Now and again I pop their cat

with a pellet gun to chase him off our feeders.

But when the trash trucks come

each Monday,

doing their slow-maw grinding action-non-action thing

and one truck stops for him

and one truck stops for me, we offset,

we reset, we're zero-sum.

Several of the poems were previously published in publications like Southern Review, Wallace Stevens Journal, American Poetry Journal, Dos Passos Review, New Delta Review and New Orleans Review, among several others, as well as from an earlier chapbook entitled "Swerve," which was published as a National Chapbook Fellowship of the Poetry Society of America and C.K. Williams. Together, these poems form a deeply satisfying and outstanding collection.

The poems of Kingdom Come are polished, almost chiseled to refinement, painstakingly written to use exactly the right word, the right line, the right idea. Estes is clear about what he is doing; as he says in "Object Permanance," "What's a poem / for, anyway, if not to make the empty / spaces habitable?" And his poems make the empty spaces habitable, the empty spaces that are everyday life.