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colorado review 152 makes them static. Van den Berg’s women protagonists are mannered to the point of being dispassionate, but passion isn’t something to be avoided in fiction. Passionate characters take action, which leads to challenges, errors, consequences. Action —not past trauma—is how characters are defined. The women in What the World encounter few changes because they take few risks. They inhabit wildly exotic landscapes, but exoticism alone does not make for drama. In the title story—and the strongest in the collection—Celia, a teenager on the verge of womanhood, accompanies her obsessive mother on a research trip to Madagascar. Celia’s desire is clear: “I’d decided to become a long-distance swimmer.” All her decisions are made in pursuit of that desire, decisions that could jeopardize her relationship with her mother. Celia, as opposed to the disenchanted women elsewhere in this collection, is young enough—perhaps naïve enough—to still see hope in the world, to believe she can still control her own fate. “Reason is overrated,” says Celia’s mother. “Caution and beauty too.” Abandon your inhibitions: it’s good advice for an interesting life, advice the young women in What the World would benefit to heed. Pursue the unseen monsters, if that’s where your passion lies. Tracer, by Richard Greenfield Omnidawn, 2009 reviewed by Sally Keith “Nothing is accident, and man, no less than nature, does nothing without plan or the discipline to make plan fact. And if it is true that we now live in fear of our own house, and can easily trace the reason for it, it is also true that we can trace reasons why those who do not or did not so live found out how to do other than we,” is Charles Olson. “I am a reader there, reading aloud, deploying a plan as a voice as / an imagined moral presence . . .” is Richard Greenfield two sentences into Tracer’s opening poem, “Speaking for.” Here also the “house” plays. Here, where domestic problems (to the wall “a colony of winged ants has stained their flightless self”) challenge straightforward 153 Book Notes poetic observation, the real action of the poem is a speaker going out for the mail; however, the description we read, the similar subplots of a suburban neighborhood described as landscape (“the controlled sugar-maples lining the designed / street, the white alder drift, the T-bar frames of the clothesline”), allows that the terrain we are entering be one marked by fracture: part description, part poetic manifesto, part record of intrusion. The plan is as dubious as it is necessary. “Already I am a we,” admits Greenfield, forewarning a resistance to confession, as the trouble of ants, real estate, politics, and poetry brilliantly intersect. Trace (v) is to find or discover. Trace (v) is to copy. What is admirable and ambitious in Greenfield’s new poems is the ability to trace his own house literally (metaphorically, the world) while keeping active the perceptions of the individual. The speaker could be any of us. Only very occasionally, and therefore all the more powerfully, do we get statements that feel directly personal. One of my favorite such moments, and arguably the most stark, comes at the end of “Weapon Alpha” after the naturalistic description ends and we come upon a statement emblematic for the book: “This was not a place, this was an event,” and this knowledge aptly propels the poem to conclusion: “I wanted to be not me / and there was no other there / without me, though I insisted in the falsity / no other was there—only the dispersal of / my own self // unwildering where I went.” And though “unwildering” feels truly what the poet desires, each poem circumambulates the origin of experience tracing a whole host of rings concentric to the origin, the I/eye. In “Actuary ” the act of tracing is literal: “I made a copy of a rose, / its blanched-blue luster pressed into the pages.” A more objectified conception of copying comes in “The Sign” as the speaker details a potentially abandoned house: “I am more than a clouded departure, I detach from my owning, / the vestige imprints in the carpet...

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