ABC Moonlight is such a classic example of the shepherds poem, or the pastoral. Like this way that the poem’s setting among nature is key for understanding what the poem could do, or why the poem was occasioned, or how the poem stands to the poet. But then, as the poem gets started, and everyone who’s there to hear the poet reading and they’re interacting with one another, it’s evident that nature is also adding to the poetry-feeling. In the classic pastoral, this was a fine feeling. Like an EcoPoetics commentary looking back at what the nature poem was always supposed to do. Mimic the nature-feeling. Or amplify the nature-feeling, because POETRY!
I mean, the other shepherds listening to the gifted storyteller in their midst are absolutely fine to just listen. And I’m not sure Ben Estes’s intention is to form a concrete pastoral figure (like is his poet really a shepherd?). The poems are more about nature framing what the poet has to say. Or nature blurring past the natural environment so you can read the human nature feeling you get while you’re in nature! Or what are you supposed to do when a poem starts because the poet was thinking of nature, but then the poet’s thinking and feeling got more self-involved, or human-informed. What’s a poet supposed to do with their poem when they’re really feeling it?? Make all these sentences that start with “or” into an engine. And that’s the poem.
Which is really the struggle for reading Estes’s book. There’s a feeling to that engine humming all around you. And the poems lean in, like you do when a group of people is really interested in something. The poems are attentive to one another as this reasonable entertainment (think of reading Virgil’s Eclogues in series, how you’re eventually just living in that landscape with the poet), and Estes’s poet along with his listeners are having a reasonably good time while their sheep wander around this pastoral landscape. I liked this pastoral frame for Estes book, partly because he mentions "a Shepherd's Hour" in one of the folded poems. And partly because there is an ambient quality to the nature appearing in the poems. Present but not too loudly present. Like these aren’t “nature poems” that provoke their reader to inhabit nature with the poet. The nature involvement in Estes’s poem is more a logic that informs the poems.
And as the book moves towards the ending, nature also steps outside the frame. Or at least a discernible representative nature. Nature becomes kind of like that one dream poem where there is a forest of fake trees, but the poet and his friends are wandering through looking for the real trees, because the real trees are grave markers. This pattern, from poet-in-nature to poet-exploring-human-nature, is why I keep trying to understand the book’s approach to nature, and why I keep returning to “pastoral” to spell it out. Because after time I learned the pastoral was not so much about being in nature as it was people together in nature using poems to pass the time.
Admittedly, the book is a little soupy. Like it takes a generous stretch to connect the "folded poems" in the opening of the book to the dream-poems appearing in "A Shadow Theater." But thinking about nature, thinking about how people's perspective will often start getting in the way of actually enjoying nature, and this latter frame of mind coming out through dreams, this is compelling!
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.