Tracer

by Richard Greenfield

Beyond speaking of possession and dominance, which so often come cloaked in the placating language of stewardship; beyond speaking as merely an observer of the destruction wreaked upon the natural and social environments of this planet―Richard Greenfield's TRACER brings us back to our senses. In an examination of the savage, and savagely beautiful particularity of our existence, this is equally and essentially a poetry that respects, even as it implicates, the mystery and peril of speaking through one's own limited frame. A word might at one moment allude to the 'tracer' who exposes an image's delicate outline and then, at the next, to the 'tracer' rounds that lethally illuminate a target in the dark. These lyric poems are deeply ethical and austerely honest in their implication of, and reflections upon, the limits of morality and honesty. Nonetheless, this is also a poetry that seeks to emancipate the voice of witness from the generalities of despair through its exacting engagement with this world.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 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

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written with US military action in Iraq in the background, Tracer uses human occupation of the landscape, of houses, and of cities as tropes to get at the deeper colonialism of the human need to draw our maps over the physically extant world, creating something predicated on the destruction of what was there before, "un-wildering" wherever we are. In these poems, "the world [is] a tiny model" where the speaker is "cloistered within it, seperate in [his] seperateness." Systems and signs destroy through their codification as "each monster/ will establish its own agenda" and each agenda will establish its own monster, and the reader is forced to ask herself "how should I feel towards the slices of violence therein."

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poems is difficult and elegiac. I read and read and read it. It's beautiful and disturbing. I'd like to read more of Richard's poems.