A Carnage in the Lovetrees

by Richard Greenfield

"Surely, all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end," said Rilke. A Carnage in the Lovetrees begins at the moment the speaker reaches this realization. He resolves then to rebuild a world caught in the crosshairs of repeated annihilation, regrounding love as the only viable stratagem for survival. Richard Greenfield’s sequence of poems searches for a way to live in the aftermath of private trauma and public disaster. It represents a struggle to reconcile the historical with the present and to find a language that allows the speaker to endure past calamities. These relentless, acrobatic, and self-aware poems resist settling for easy solutions, or even closure, but instead push toward the difficult compromise of the livable.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2003

About the author

Richard Greenfield is the author of A Carnage in the Lovetrees (University of California Press), Tracer (Omnidawn), and Subterranean (Omnidawn) (Publishers Weekly Starred Review). He is co-editor of Apostrophe Books, a small press of poetry, which began publishing books in 2007. He currently teaches in the creative writing program at New Mexico State University.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book starts with this very intense narrative involving father and mother. And I can sense this narrative connecting these poems together. What I enjoyed the most, though, was the appearance of lusting love at different moments. How the speaker felt detached from that, and how this might be attributed to the dilemmas surrounding both parents gave a complicated gravity to the book.

[Tonya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really hot poetry!