Customer Reviews

A Carnage in the Lovetrees (New California Poetry)

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Haunting, meloncholy, and beautiful. Richard Greenfield writes a lovely and disturbing collection of poems in this book. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in modern poetry.

Although I'm no expert in poetry (and so few are!), I'll tell you what I liked, and maybe that will give you a taste of this book. First, I like the way Greenfield tries to capture memories. His unique abbreviated style is a sort of shorthand to recollections of another epoch in the speaker's life. I also like the way he breathes new life into tired comparisons by turns of line and phrase--for example, under his rendering, a trees' branches guide the growth of the speakers' nerves, in some sort of reciprocal plan. I also like the way I can hear wrenched ghosts of other writers--e.g. "My voice has been lonely to me & a tonnage of personal/ evacuations"--Berryman, anyone? Fourth, I enjoy the speaker's (Middle English?) habit of jamming two words next to each other to create something new: "lovetrees", "flamedress", "rageweed". I like the way rural images like abandoned homesteads and the "sugary purl" of snowmelt appear, perhaps reflecting Greenfield's own peripatetic biography. Sixth, I found the presentation of the speaker's drug-addicted, self-destructive father to be masterly, and loved and was troubled by the "slurred, ambitious rhetoric of his hollering." The emotional notes Greenfield hit on this topic are absolutely perfect to me. In fact, only one poem out of this whole hefty first book was silly ("Bibemus &"), but that's just fussing. I can't believe how good this book is compared to those of so many other poetry professionals who are so much better at self-promotion, and are so much better well known. I can only hope this stunning first bundle leads to more, and that Greenfield continues to be properly recognized as a first-rate artist of rare gifts and sensibility.