Tracer by Richard Greenfield

Reviewed by Eric Weinstein

ISBN 978-1-890650-38-4
Omnidawn Publishing, 2009

“The old world is still out there, too / where the roads are intraworking” Richard Greenfield reminds us in “Annals,” my favorite poem in Tracer, which begins:

Here in the outskirts,

where sea fossils
locked into the ridges,

                                 wrote

“The rain sluiced
the trees bare of the earth—”

           this was my history, too,

      here in the outskirts

Greenfield inhabits “the outskirts” “in the fringe month” in this collection, raising questions of locality: where and how one fits into and functions in the world. From his vantage point in the rural /suburban where he “forget[s] friends” and “the calendar / is a reliable prediction,” Greenfield observes and records the simultaneous and contradictory natures of global war—mundane and extraordinary, inconsequential and monumental—and aptly traces the shapes of those wars without overtly displaying their contents or individual identities to the reader, rendering for his audience a kind of remote duplicate, an approximation, of violence. This is itself commentary on those of us who are not daily touched by war and violence, by “the old world,” and the fact that “We can’t tell ourselves / from those whose loss is actual.”

Tracer, while serious in nature, also displays Greenfield’s wry, often ironic sense of humor. In “Hellfire,” he says: “I want to wrap my / compositional theory in duct tape—” and in “Eris,” he laments “the tender style / of the flower / turned financial.” These tongue-in-cheek moments should not be mistaken for lightheartedness, however: they serve to underscore, not to mitigate, the sense of loss—and, worse yet, anonymous loss—that pervades the collection.

It is this sense of loss and vacancy that is the root of Tracer—one might imagine the hollow shell that is the result of the act of tracing—and the missing personal histories the reader is left to imagine for himself. Greenfield only hints at these vanished presences, noting, “daylight, the rooms evacuated, loud nailholes in the drywall / leak autobiography.” It is the authors of these autobiographies, the men and women inside the chalk outlines, that this collection compels us to pursue.

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Prick of the Spindle Poetry Editor Eric Weinstein's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of online and print publications, including Best New Poets 2009. His poems have been nominated for inclusion in the annual Pushcart Prize anthology and have won several awards, including the Anne Flexner Award in poetry. A native of Nashua, New Hampshire, he currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

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