Keith Montesano. Ghost Lights. Dream Horse Press, 2010.
Reviewed by John Beardsley
In Ghost Lights, the debut collection by Keith Montesano, the poet pulls us into a charred and soot-blackened world of rust belt decay, where a multitude of lives and their respective indignities are laid on the examination table for the various speakers' consideration and ours. It is a book of meditations and elegies, spun out in vivid and cinematic narrative. Montesano’s poems take in film, music, and news items, as well as personal and public history, recording the resulting collisions with the dutiful eye of a forensic photographer while demonstrating both an impressive lyricism and control of form.
In the book’s first section, for instance, we see the aftermath of a double murder in a dead-end, rest-stop town (Two Halves: Elegy for One Summer’s Dawn). We witness a man’s struggle with suicide, framed by Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, as well as examining the motives of a teacher who has impregnated his 12-year-old student.
What is remarkable in all of these poems is the tenderness and human respect with which Montesano treats even the most despicable of figures, so that when, in “Poem Ending with a Hundred Year-Old House on Fire” the speaker tells us “…I will say a prayer for this: for the ash / of the body and the foundation, and for the water beneath us / surging toward the wreckage of our lives” we understand, and believe.
In ‘Going Home,’ the final poem of the second section, the speaker asks “Where are all the people now? The screams / and muffled cries?” And when we attempt to return to our home through “…ditch grass, singed fields to broken back windows, edged / like knives” the childhood home one expects to find is decrepit and harrowed. We “[t]rudge through busted walls, shredded carpet, rotted doors.” While we want for the comfort of our own nostalgia, it can never arrive. Perhaps, we realize, because it was never there to begin with—to wit, Montesano suggests “there is no past, just this memory, and the wreck after you fled.”
Interspersed throughout the book's second and third sections are a series of ‘Alternate Featurette[s],’ poems which restage and reinterpret a variety of films, from the 1989 Fred Savage / Howie Mandel vehicle Little Monsters, to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, to the critically acclaimed documentary Zoo, the subject of which is a man who dies of a perforated colon after being penetrated by a horse. The first 'Alternate Featurette' in the third section uses Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs to further complicate and explore the already grim and menacing vision of domestic space:
The people under the stairs have flashlights, water, scant food—
bodies of the murdered—
moan like they’re dying, and they are. Still the quest for priceless coins,
this American Dream
of real gold and cured cancer, of cleansed bodies and intact limbs.
One has escaped
to within the walls, knows every inch and crevice, which way
to pull each lever,
how each door can reveal the future. But there are windows
with unbreakable glass
Unlike the formulaic save-the-girl-save-the-world ending of Craven’s feature, however, Montesano reminds us that “in our world, / the house doesn’t explode, and the coins and bills don’t billow / and plummet / like funnel clouds to the ground. Because the boy dies, and the children still get kidnapped...”
The poems in this section show us the myriad ways in which we are helpless to do anything but watch, to witness. In “Portrait Detail, With Yellowjackets,” we see a dog being stung to death by a swarm of wasps; in “Second Floor Fire,” a woman trapped, “howling before fingertips poke / through the small bottom crack, caught / and turning blood ripe....” The first lines of Ghost Lights, the titular and final poem, call us back to the images of conflagration and thwarted escape that run through the book, less threads than veins:
What about the part where the story ends? It ends
with our bodies like machines. Charred like paper—
singed like leaves. Arms reaching out: Come. Now.
Who says the hands of the dead don’t ask us
to go there with them?
In Montesano’s poems, the dead do ask us, perhaps even drag us back with them. We are forced again and again to bear witness to the depredations of our world; those ravishments—the suicides, the rapes and abuses, the infidelities—reverberate through even our most quotidian moments, spool out into questions that trouble us and the speaker relentlessly, even after the curtain has come down, even after every light has been snuffed.
Keith Montesano has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Literary Review, Third Coast, Another Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere. His manuscript was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award from Southern Illinois University Press. He is a PhD. Candidate in English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University.
John R. Beardsley is a doctoral student in Florida State University's Creative Writing Program in poetry, and a contributing writer and reviewer for SER Online. His work has appeared in 42 Opus and Miracle Monocle.
Reviewed by John Beardsley
In Ghost Lights, the debut collection by Keith Montesano, the poet pulls us into a charred and soot-blackened world of rust belt decay, where a multitude of lives and their respective indignities are laid on the examination table for the various speakers' consideration and ours. It is a book of meditations and elegies, spun out in vivid and cinematic narrative. Montesano’s poems take in film, music, and news items, as well as personal and public history, recording the resulting collisions with the dutiful eye of a forensic photographer while demonstrating both an impressive lyricism and control of form.
In the book’s first section, for instance, we see the aftermath of a double murder in a dead-end, rest-stop town (Two Halves: Elegy for One Summer’s Dawn). We witness a man’s struggle with suicide, framed by Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, as well as examining the motives of a teacher who has impregnated his 12-year-old student.
What is remarkable in all of these poems is the tenderness and human respect with which Montesano treats even the most despicable of figures, so that when, in “Poem Ending with a Hundred Year-Old House on Fire” the speaker tells us “…I will say a prayer for this: for the ash / of the body and the foundation, and for the water beneath us / surging toward the wreckage of our lives” we understand, and believe.
In ‘Going Home,’ the final poem of the second section, the speaker asks “Where are all the people now? The screams / and muffled cries?” And when we attempt to return to our home through “…ditch grass, singed fields to broken back windows, edged / like knives” the childhood home one expects to find is decrepit and harrowed. We “[t]rudge through busted walls, shredded carpet, rotted doors.” While we want for the comfort of our own nostalgia, it can never arrive. Perhaps, we realize, because it was never there to begin with—to wit, Montesano suggests “there is no past, just this memory, and the wreck after you fled.”
Interspersed throughout the book's second and third sections are a series of ‘Alternate Featurette[s],’ poems which restage and reinterpret a variety of films, from the 1989 Fred Savage / Howie Mandel vehicle Little Monsters, to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, to the critically acclaimed documentary Zoo, the subject of which is a man who dies of a perforated colon after being penetrated by a horse. The first 'Alternate Featurette' in the third section uses Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs to further complicate and explore the already grim and menacing vision of domestic space:
The people under the stairs have flashlights, water, scant food—
bodies of the murdered—
moan like they’re dying, and they are. Still the quest for priceless coins,
this American Dream
of real gold and cured cancer, of cleansed bodies and intact limbs.
One has escaped
to within the walls, knows every inch and crevice, which way
to pull each lever,
how each door can reveal the future. But there are windows
with unbreakable glass
Unlike the formulaic save-the-girl-save-the-world ending of Craven’s feature, however, Montesano reminds us that “in our world, / the house doesn’t explode, and the coins and bills don’t billow / and plummet / like funnel clouds to the ground. Because the boy dies, and the children still get kidnapped...”
The poems in this section show us the myriad ways in which we are helpless to do anything but watch, to witness. In “Portrait Detail, With Yellowjackets,” we see a dog being stung to death by a swarm of wasps; in “Second Floor Fire,” a woman trapped, “howling before fingertips poke / through the small bottom crack, caught / and turning blood ripe....” The first lines of Ghost Lights, the titular and final poem, call us back to the images of conflagration and thwarted escape that run through the book, less threads than veins:
What about the part where the story ends? It ends
with our bodies like machines. Charred like paper—
singed like leaves. Arms reaching out: Come. Now.
Who says the hands of the dead don’t ask us
to go there with them?
In Montesano’s poems, the dead do ask us, perhaps even drag us back with them. We are forced again and again to bear witness to the depredations of our world; those ravishments—the suicides, the rapes and abuses, the infidelities—reverberate through even our most quotidian moments, spool out into questions that trouble us and the speaker relentlessly, even after the curtain has come down, even after every light has been snuffed.
Keith Montesano has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Literary Review, Third Coast, Another Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere. His manuscript was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award from Southern Illinois University Press. He is a PhD. Candidate in English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University.
John R. Beardsley is a doctoral student in Florida State University's Creative Writing Program in poetry, and a contributing writer and reviewer for SER Online. His work has appeared in 42 Opus and Miracle Monocle.