Ghost Review

William Pettit’s Ghost Songs deftly sketch traces of the human and once-human, once-present, in the landscapes the speaker finds himself in and is shaped by. These poems are landscapes, acts of mind arranged and reactant, geological and cultural, personal and impersonal, always the desiring subject and the subject of desire: here is a reverence for and appreciation of the provisionality and ephemerality of thought (and of course life) itself. A sense of humor suffuses many of these poems, the embrace of the momentary as momentary, fluid sympathies—Pettit’s lines are shifty, flexible—without will-to-transcendence, in fact, quite the opposite. The painter grounds his poems in life-material expressively spatialized, always with an eye on “all fallen feathers of the stark season”—landscape as inscape, with the (however muffled) roar of time behind it. Nomentana is momentana: in these poems the now and the names of things shift continually becoming past and present, eroding and evolving, here and gone: “songs to the vanished” for all of us vanishing.
Karl Parker. Karl Parker teaches modern/contemporary poetry/poetics and creative writing at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, NY. The recipient of the 2004 Poetry Award from the National Arts Club, NYC, he is the author of a chapbook, HARMSTORM (Lame House Press 2007),and a book of poems, PERSONATIONSKIN (Notell Press 2009).