Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City

Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City by Angie Estes. Atlanta, Ga: Unbound Editions Press, 2025. 87pp. $25.00 (paper)

I’ve never liked blurb writing. It reminds me of the Taoist maxim “do all by doing nothing,” the blurb version being “Say nothing by saying all.” But with Angie Estes’s new book, Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City, the blurb writers have nailed it: “moving between artistic/literary history and the perils of human desire” (Mark Irwin), or “a mind that follows one path only to discover another more surprising one” (Kevin Prufer).d I agree.     

Estes has published seven books of poetry and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2010. Considerations of space forbid a list of her other prizes, awards, fellowships, grants, and residencies. She has taught at Ashland University and Oberlin. Ohio State was her academic home for many years, though readers will not find Woody Hayes or “four yards and a cloud of dust” in the book under review—it’s all high European culture, etymology, and love. By love I don’t mean number crunching, monetized modern love; I mean swim-the-Hellespont love as in olden times. The high culture, love, and word lore support each other: the love dramatizes the culture, raising it above high tourism, and—noblesse oblige—the culture makes an elegant stage where love can spread its wings. The etymology is a gearbox downshifting for U turns and bewildering changes of direction.        

My problem—maybe it’s only my problem—is that I get to the end of an Estes poem and think are we there yet? I can track the abrupt segues and swerves but can’t see what pulls the poem together. A poem is not a freshman composition, but having taken courses with Allen Tate in my youth, I can’t shake the feeling that a critic should be able to produce an explication du texte, although Tate himself, writing on Valery, bailed out with a suavely elusive line, “the meaning may exist only In our sense of it.”     

Often what seems to extend an image becomes a new track, leading where? I couldn’t let go of Spring in which a run-over squirrel lies flattened, “arm” extended in a halo of blood, reminding Estes how the halos of two martyrs in a Fra Angelico painting cling to their decapitated heads. Roadkill to Renaissance. Those heads rolling away inspire the whimsy that they could be restored through Kintsugi, the Japanese technique of porcelain repair, and Estes’s explication emerges into a vast new possibility: Past and present are sutured together. Earlier, Faulkner’s insistence that the past is never really past rolled by. So spring, bursting with new blooms, turns out to include the past, specifically desire “which was never ending.”

The process above: roadkill to Fra Angelico to Kintsugi to the past recaptured, is not “building a chicken coop in a hurricane,” as Faulkner described novel-writing; it’s a developed technique employed by Estes to construct most of her pieces. “She Said She Saw Vowels” is another brain bender, a fiendish piece of misdirection for those who get off at the Rimbaud exit. The title being part of the first line (her usual practice), the continuation reads “underneath the bird feeder.” Eventually we recall that the gone but not forgotten other woman is a native speaker of Russian, so “Vowels” becomes a thickly accented but more plausible “voles.” Readers who had imagined AEIOU’s hearing cardinals and jaybirds fluttering down to fill their beaks with sunflower seeds will feel like Wile E. Coyote dashing out over empty space. The blindness of these voles Estes compares to the blindfolded Jesus led to the cross in Northern European art, unlike the sighted Jesus which fetched twenty-four million euros after it was shown to be the missing wing from a Cimabue polyptych--the “volet gauche.” So we’re back with voles, or close enough. Next, the animals are endowed with empathy but, like dark matter, empathy reveals itself only in action “as with love when it’s over/ or the body deep in a grave.” The poem ends with the thought that a body keeps moving long after death, and we remember the image of voles moving blindly which began the poem. Thus the emotional climax is grief over lost love, still with its hooks in the body. Another Estes, the blues man Sleepy John Estes says, “Someday Baby, you ain’t gon’ worry my mind anymore,” a liberation in which Angie Estes seems to invest little hope.      

I shouldn’t fret; it appears to work, whatever “work” means in poetry. She has certainly found her own style, unmistakable and inimitable. She often quotes Proust; many of her titles come from Proust, and he presides over her sense of love—"lived happily ever after” is never going to happen. But the poems are not lugubrious. Rather, they suggest the influence of Sappho, whose presence I feel in Estes’s ability to turn lost love into something high, rapt, rich in sensual memory. These lines from Sappho: 

                And below the apple branches, cold
               Clear water sounds, everything shadowed
               By roses, and sleep that falls from
               Bright shaking leaves.
               And a pasture for horses blossoms
              With the flowers of spring, and breezes
              Are flowing here like honey:
              Come to me here. 

suggested Estes’s

                           They stopped mowing
                 The path through the tall meadow grass
                                  Where I first saw you. Eventually
                            The sheared sides moved back
                   Together, not like the Red Sea after Moses
                                             parted it—more like the part
                    in my hair that won’t stay
                                              where you put it. (p. 65)      

Seeking a larger context, I come up empty. Unlike the American ex-pat who spurns the heartland, Estes can evoke her parents, or their Blue Ridge mountain roots with clarity. In the European material, there is a faint echo of earlier Americans abroad, not the “lost generation” of the ‘20s, maybe the Paris Review crowd of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, or James Merrill and his friends. Many of these, however, were born with a silver spoon in their mouths and later flirted with the CIA—not Estes’s style, though you can never prove that someone is not a CIA agent, as Allen Dulles pointed out.

Estes’s verse conveys a strong-willed personality—This is what I want to say; take it or leave it. Such confidence creates dramatic tension when lost love is the recurring culmination of poem after poem. Popular culture teaches us that self-assurance will always win the day. But,  “Love Oh Love Oh Careless Love.”

Reviewer Lem Coley is a retired professor of literature who lives on Long Island. He frequently reviews poetry books for The Manhattan Review.