Customer Reviews

Ghost Lights

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An exemplary collection by the young and supremely talented Keith Montesano. The poems collected herein explore the pscyhological, spiritual, and physiological repurcussions and limits of elegiac speech, poesy, rhetoric, and shape. The poet, while in control of his world and the life he spins from the crumbs of love and death, never--and yet always--succombs to the beauty of language and image above all else.

Comparing and contrasting the remnants of movie scenes, lines, and character motivations with often heart-breaking and violent news-stories, Montesano creates a world unsettled and unsettling, a world where cinema invades and evades his speaker's pysche and the murders, kidnappings, and unsolved crimes from the back of America's newspapers add texture to a grizzled/grizzly voice. These poems ache with a clarity of mind and glitter with an adventurous linguistic spirit, but never once will one of Montesano's speakers admit psychological defeat without simultaneously admitting and exemplifying a strength of spirit found rarely in contemporary poetry.

Elegiac in turns and celebratory always, Montesano's poems sing the day as they envelope the night and always in-between is the language lit from within like firefly cupped between palms.

A must read for all poetry fans. Buy your copy now!

I come to Keith Montesano's work through cinema, rather than poetry, as I'm versed much more in the former. Anyone who loves the delicate natural beauty of Terrence Malick's films will be at home here - but Montesano's work is also rooted in something darker and more elegiac, a perpetual sense of tragedy and loss interwoven with visual splendor. A wonderful first collection.