In Ghost Songs, Pettit takes a strong draw of cigarette at the weather worn wood posts of an earth valve; standing between nature and the vision of his own fleshly experience. Gone country and expat, he’s no Emerson resident. He took a Baudelaire refinement and left its womb behind for other sultriness. These poems, written between two thousand and two thousand three, are long sittings in an artist’s repose with armor fati and its quiet surrender to personal dissonance and personal narratives. To the degree they are personal accounts Pettit reveals in them both an agitation and serenade from the experience of nature’s expanse against his personal nuances and interactions.

Many of the poems employ the reader to accompany the city’s heart into country shadows. That place where blood meets dirt, meat feeds star, and gnawed bones grind the mill raw; spreading ashes to a chosen home. Recycling in nature’s cycles are city’s conjectures and city sarcasm. Partly languid and at times bilious, his reflections seduce wit slyly across the romantics of country, youth, wine, women, friendship and travel.

Our glorified bridge: mountain onward / Even the gridded city glows like typed cotton paper / like water in an earthquake circles / like the bricks stacked against us.

His poems are riddled with references but not confounded by them. They are exclusive but accessible. In the poem

Salt of the Salt of Life

we find historical reference to express a Nietzschean outlook of pain to reality to power, which is followed by an immediate transition into a personal geography and a Fitzgerald metaphor. He conjures ancient architecture to the expression of personal sentiments and philosophic meditations & each transition a poetic movement, a geographic tour. Willing to hope, but dark set against living death; shadows keep spry his new light on the country side.

March Waltz

is a night’s mind equivalent of Peter and the Wolf. That is, in the sense, that a child whispers innocent adventure to the heart while the spleen grins adult sardonic cynicism. The poem ends: “See that fire / that ghost?” Begetting in comparison that this isn’t a wolf hunted down and paraded jovial; this is a youth aged quiet, not only on the prowl, but on keen watch.
In summation, through country meditations, Pettit journeys across personal continents and takes the reader there in poem and pause. Geographically influenced, these poems aren’t maps; they’re scents just before vanishing (footsteps).

Colby Hartsell 02/2009