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Richard Greenfield
A Carnage in the Lovetrees
Poems
$34.95, £19.95 hardcover
978-0-520-23621-9
Available Now
$17.95, £10.95 paperback
978-0-520-23809-1
Available Now
80 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches,
April 2003, Available worldwide
Categories: Literary Studies; Poetry
April 2003, Available worldwide
Categories: Literary Studies; Poetry
This book was named a Book Sense Top Ten University Press Book for the Fall of 2003
"Building slowly from pieces scattered, even shattered, but still unnervingly present, Greenfield's story speaks for many, yet he presents it uniquely, revealing language as a mode of perception that can rearrange the past—but only if it's quick enough. Greenfield's language is that quick—and sharp, and startlingly beautiful."—Cole Swensen, author of Such Rich Hour
"Like a blue-faced television in a darkened room, a backstory lights up this rhapsodic outpouring. This is a cunning attack on both the ever-fading memory and on conventional methods of poetic confession —'The trigger is set on annihilation.' I'm truly amazed by these poems."—Mary Jo Bang, author of Louise in Love
"Greenfield tells us to 'Recognize the world,' know it again, since the only knowledge that counts is re-cognition. He presents those second knowings, recapitulations, bright flashing revisitings of pain and pleasure, which enact a kind of fumbling seduction between us and the world. In this book we recognize our best possibilities, and our worst fears, but it is all brilliant. This book is brilliance."—Bin Ramke, author of Airs, Waters, Places
"Like a blue-faced television in a darkened room, a backstory lights up this rhapsodic outpouring. This is a cunning attack on both the ever-fading memory and on conventional methods of poetic confession —'The trigger is set on annihilation.' I'm truly amazed by these poems."—Mary Jo Bang, author of Louise in Love
"Greenfield tells us to 'Recognize the world,' know it again, since the only knowledge that counts is re-cognition. He presents those second knowings, recapitulations, bright flashing revisitings of pain and pleasure, which enact a kind of fumbling seduction between us and the world. In this book we recognize our best possibilities, and our worst fears, but it is all brilliant. This book is brilliance."—Bin Ramke, author of Airs, Waters, Places
"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.
from Schema:
In the field of traumas come the base savannas—crosshairs tighten on the flaring pink of the evening.
Recognize the world. After the bit of blue, after a window opened to air and the portioned stereo of love and grandeur, after—
mother sews a fell-off button, heats a stew, sews at the factory, re-stews, tires, starts (again),
father shortens a barrel, leans blast-weapons beneath windows, stacks ammo with scream and apocalypse.
Under cover, you are dead behind the couch when they knock.
From the first, in the glossed-over city where none reprimand violence, the palms executed along the auto avenues thrive—a pitch-staggered procession in white-painted trunks.
The memoir has shown how bitter and relentless is the rind—privacy flowers pubescent, hopeful to outlast time.
Traffic flows or stops on elevated structures in denial of the seven-point-two,
and in the aftermath of advertising, children wander the highway in search of litter.
The citizens are trembling among the trembling.
Against the green strip—against the urbane and its expansion into the continent, the boulevard is the last boundary between the sky and the low-lying building,
though it is too accomplished among the rest of the wreckage.
They have their memories. The trigger is set on annihilation.
In the field of traumas come the base savannas—crosshairs tighten on the flaring pink of the evening.
Recognize the world. After the bit of blue, after a window opened to air and the portioned stereo of love and grandeur, after—
mother sews a fell-off button, heats a stew, sews at the factory, re-stews, tires, starts (again),
father shortens a barrel, leans blast-weapons beneath windows, stacks ammo with scream and apocalypse.
Under cover, you are dead behind the couch when they knock.
From the first, in the glossed-over city where none reprimand violence, the palms executed along the auto avenues thrive—a pitch-staggered procession in white-painted trunks.
The memoir has shown how bitter and relentless is the rind—privacy flowers pubescent, hopeful to outlast time.
Traffic flows or stops on elevated structures in denial of the seven-point-two,
and in the aftermath of advertising, children wander the highway in search of litter.
The citizens are trembling among the trembling.
Against the green strip—against the urbane and its expansion into the continent, the boulevard is the last boundary between the sky and the low-lying building,
though it is too accomplished among the rest of the wreckage.
They have their memories. The trigger is set on annihilation.
Not Even Then: Poems, by Brian Blanchfield