In Greenfield’s Subterranean, the reader is situated in the Southwest desert where grief shapes the narrative. This grief felt by the poet is steeped heavily in his father’s death as well as general environmental doom. In a line such as “...my watery children / demolished the earth they sang as humanly as possible” (46), a connection is drawn between the death of an environment and the death of a close relation. Within the aftermath of death, there seems to be a human moment of possibility that is left in wake. The {Transcription} poems follow this same logic. These distinct poems open with a negative emotion towards a natural occurrence (ex. “--received a letter but it was an ad for a big / sale--too broke--” and ponder the relationship between the negative feeling and the final recollection of possibility from the wreck: “the garbage was picked up / … a taste outside language”. I take this final line on page 53 to express the blossoming of positive deduction and allows for the poet to reflect in a form that allows genuine space for thought. 

 

The first explicit connection between environmental impoverishment, the mythic landscape of the poem, and parental death in particular, is found in “BORDER”. The first lines open the manuscript to the general themes floating against the backdrop of flourishing linguistic play. This poem opens Subterranean for the reader into the stages of grief; first, the speaker of the poem must deny the death (“Parent-death a no-more”) to process the trauma reflected in the following pages. 

 

Eleven poems carry the title {Transcription}. The black-inked page is a negative backdrop against the white text, ghosting the language and emulating the dead. In the poem {Transcription} on page 18, the line that enacts the stage of anger in the model of grief and possibly the speaker’s confusion is: 

 

     the deadfather retched / from the belly of deadfathers

 

This model can be continued with more anger emanating from the lines in the poem “NONVIOLENT VIOLENT”, wherein the speaker watches the anger and brawl of the world around them. This brawl seems to be reflected inside the speaker as well, wherein pointed declaratives make powerful emotional statements for the reader. For example,

 

     I will be enflamed before myself / and I will be loved. / Crack my throat open / and scandalize           me.

 

Emanates that same nonviolent violent anger towards the self after a close traumatic death in one’s life. The book proceeds in this fashion, following the narrative through bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The speaker bargains with an unknown other amidst the question:

 

     What if in the steps ahead in these several economies I could mortgage the month? .... to refuse       the endless payments to that abstraction the balance which every year adds another principle? 

 

The want for time is pressing here, and the speaker must bargain with the concept of mortgaging a month in poetry to retain that time back for emotional profit. The speaker desires that emotional connection with the one already passed from this timeline. The depression stage is modeled at the end of another {Transcription} on page 38. The earth is depicted as a consumer, trying to turn the evil nightmares of the speaker into the gold of morning. From this point forward, the speaker of the poems seems to be mulling over these past emotions in conglomeration, eventually making their way towards the final stage of grief in literature and poetry: acceptance. One of the final poems in the manuscript, “Edge Effect”, is the best example of this acceptance stage. The earth is finally seen in golden light by the speaker, and they promise themselves environmental rejuvenation in the lines--

 

     Yes it will rain 

     & nourish

                                        Will

     grow                            Will yield

 

Richard Greenfield’s Subterranean exposes nature to its finest details, bringing forward the human emotions of grief to the mythic landscape of poetry. While reading this collection of work, I was enamored with the array of forms on the printed page. The use of forms both broken and whole in regards to the separation of lines provides a white space that both haunts and informs the reader. The absence of the white space in poems such as “The Second Circle” allows for the body of the poem to become the corpse discussed in the subject by the poet. With these particular choices in form and content, an elegy is formed that tries to chart the untraceable distance between death and language.