
Review: Daddy by Michael Montlack
reviewed by Jeffery Berg
Daddy
Michael Montlack
NYQ Books, September 2020
$18.95; 88 pp.
ISBN: 978-1630450595
Michael Montlack’s Daddy offers a prism of perspectives through straightforward, pithy, and frank poems. In a way, it’s a daring title for a poetry collection—if not looking at Christopher Shields’s great seahorse tattooed bicep book cover art, one could immediately think of Plath. Dedicated to the author’s parents, the book is divided into three distinct sections: “Daddy,” “Mother,” and “Father.” Before these sections begin, the opening “birth” poem sets in place the collection’s thematic stances—playful tampering with gender roles and a melding of the animal, the carnal with the human. The poem introduces Montlack’s undeniable cleverness and unique, astute way of arranging images: “how the round, puffed belly” of the pregnant male seahorse, “looks / like my father’s beer gut.” Throughout the collection, Montlack’s lines and line breaks are sharply drawn (“…reveal so little. I want to know / what kind of man will emerge / when a child disappears in the waves”).
The “Daddy” section highlights, with humor and warmth, the “mythologies” of the “Daddy”—a queer, sexually-infused identity that Montlack’s speaker is occasionally pegged as. The speaker in these poems does not always exude the stereotypical gruff confidence of that image—there’s a layer of insecurity and self-depreciation (“My hard-on keeps me from / giggling. And wondering / how I got here. How they— / in their own self-assurance— / have cast me as their lead, / though clearly at best / I’m a supporting actor”). The performative qualities of the “Daddy” is about age difference and appearance but also expectation that the speaker struggles keeping up with. In one of the more memorable and droll poems, “Schroeder,” the speaker identifies with Shultz’s Lucy “sprawled (sometimes / spread-eagled!)” on the blond cartoon character’s piano, “begging / him to take a request—to include me / somewhere in the repertoire.” Eclectic pop portraits figure in Montlack’s “repertoire” in Daddy, from Stevie Nicks to Maggie Smith’s portrayal of the Dowager Countess of Grantham on Downton Abbey (one poem is composed of an array of her witty lines from the program). In these portrayals and guises, the speaker and Montlack have a wide view of generational differences. Over the poems is the specter of AIDS (“In his mid-thirties, a little more / than a decade younger than me, / wasn’t AIDS a ghost story for him?”) and even more directly and intimately in a moving poem about one’s friendship with a former therapist, who at 84, recalls the beginnings of the crisis: “I was helping young men to die.” Interspersed between these poems are “Dickorum” pieces (a play upon the word “decorum”) which are full of energy and the layered comic hues of stand-up.
One of Montlack’s main points of beauty and skill in Daddy are his descriptions of sounds through imagery. In “Loft,” the speaker is “lured by his baritone” and “the orange blossoms in his voice.” Later in “Stevie,” I don’t think I’ve read a poem that so cuttingly gets to the bone of a singer’s voice: “What else can be said about the aftertaste of her alto? / A 170-proof vodka upstaged by its wispy twist of tangerine peel.” This is a swoony, fervently bittersweet love note of a poem to an icon.
“Stevie” and other poems about women figure in the “Mother” section—from family, including the speaker’s haunted birth origins, to the mythical (Medusa), to the ordinary but extraordinarily unique—like “Cherry Grove Carla” or a Mary Poppins-like seatmate on a plane with endless knickknacks in her purse. Many of these poems are akin to Montlack’s previous slick and sunshiny collection Cool Limbo. Interestingly, that collection is a tribute to his sister. Montlack’s view of family becomes even more expansive in his new book. There’s a certain liveliness to these observational “Mother” poems. One poem is a quick scene of a humorous airport goodbye of a mother the speaker’s sister) to her young daughter. Montlack seems especially adroit and simultaneously carefree here.
In the “Father” section, save for an amusing piece on the naming of a puppy (“I just want a gay name. / And my gay son to name him.”), the poems have a distinctly more laconic, less loquacious and conversational feel. Perhaps because they are addressing a man who is “cowboy quiet,” there’s a sudden spare lyric musing on a flock of birds, ending starkly with “You were a man of few words / in life too.” And from the set-piece of birds crossing the sky, Montlack zeroes in of fathers of the speaker’s past, watching their God-like creation “of fire” by the sending up of fireworks. Montlack’s “My Father Workshop” outlines the speaker’s inherent differences with his father “like a makeshift cop / patrolling the beat of things / and how they worked / while I was distracted by the why…” and later a fatherly mantra: “Do things right / or not do them at all.” It’s certainly a daunting mantra and one that Montlack seems to wrestle with. Ultimately, his poems are seemingly perfected with their particular line breaks and smoothed-down feel, but also raw, unassuming, and untethered (like Stevie’s voice), especially in their subject matter. Since Montlack’s speaker seems so passionate and simultaneously at peace, Daddy is a pleasing read. It’s fitting then that the book ends with a lingering good-bye in a death poem called “Unceremonial”—there’s something unassuming, pleasurable, and free about Montlack’s poems but also ardently and vividly drawn and designed.
Jeffery Berg‘s poems have appeared in Impossible Archetype, Other People’s Flowers, Punch Drunk Press, El Balazo Press, GlitterMOB, the Leveler, Court Green, Rove, Map Literary, Assaracus and Harpur Palate, and No, Dear. He received an MFA from NYU. A Virginia Center of the Creative Arts fellow, Jeffery lives in Jersey City and blogs at jdbrecords.
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