Richard Greenfield, _Subterranean_

I REGISTER CONTINUITY in this one, continuity of a kind--Tracer (for me) was a consciousness engaging with a landscape at a specific historical moment, and I would characterize Subterranean the same way. But it's a different landscape, a different historical moment, and even in some ways not exactly the same consciousness, continuities notwithstanding.

The landscape feels drier, emptier, more widescreen, with different flora than in Tracer. Arroyos, deserts, coyotes, cactus...less wooded, but trees are still important. More important than ever, in fact.

While Tracer was steeped in the dread of Dubya's second term, Subterranean belongs to a more recent moment. Not necessarily our present Trumpian moment--I imagine most of the poems were at least begun a while back. Instead, we have reminders of how a lot of what we loathe about the Trump era was already going on under Obama (don't get me wrong, I miss him too): tightened immigration ("The Fence"), heightened surveillance ("This Underglass Structure"), the envenomed, suffocating embrace of capital ("Occupy the Specter").

And the consciousness? Well, it's recognizably the same at several points. The sections that share the title "[Transcription]," scattered through the book, are rawer, less processed than the titled poems and often recall A Carnage in the Lovetrees, especially in their sometimes anguished invocations of the "deadfather." Recognizable, too, is the poet's skepticism about poetry:

          I should be 
primed I should mark
a melody here
                   yet I deny
 pleasure is here 
                    I'm in 
the mood for stark notation
   ("They Will Bluff Us to Influence Us")

Recognizable, too, is that the consciousness encountering a landscape in history knows it is a consciousness encountering a landscape in history:

   This is a strict inventory of the moment of place in this 
moment so as to return later, in mind, to this edge effect--this 
   overlap of the human apprehended as itself and the others it 
apprehended as their selves--incursions in which we will not reach 
   any forms of uncorrupted, deified natures, self-exiled in the 
grandness of ego. The entirety of the anthropocene--the blip of it--
the mean cottonwood copse of us for now. 
("Sun Ray")

But then there are the trees. Something feels different here. They appear frequently, but I would specifically cite those in "Pando," "The Fence," and "Subterranean." That the last provides the book with its title seems worth noticing. With trees, the poems emphasize, there is much more going on underground than you would ever suspect--were you truly to grasp what is going on underground, indeed, it would utterly overthrow most of what you think is going on aboveground. That is true of trees, of landscapes, of moments in history, of consciousness.

In a book full of killer final lines--"I owned that pish bucket, and the draught from it was drinkable"; "I had no tactic"; "I stood in line for a vaccine"--I would give the palm to the close of the final poem, the second of two titled "Edge Effect":

 no new ground was possible until now