Still on Earth: Poems

"In Still on Earth, David Romtvedt addresses the sometimes disconcerting, sometimes thrilling, and, if we are to believe the poet, always wacky intersections and collisions between a person and the society and culture within which that person exists-crawls, swims, flies, lives, and one day dies. The book presents the apparently autobiographical history of an individual who is a writer only in the moment of writing. Romtvedt depicts the speaker as a child of working-class parents in a house with no books, a child for whom books were, as is often the case, a refuge and an escape. The childhood that emerges is one that offered the opportunity, per the voice of the father in the poem "Thunderstorm," to toughen up. A poem, the father in the book argues, is worth next to nothing. And while the son disagrees, having experienced transformation through language, he also recognizes that the poem cannot buy the groceries and pay the rent. Or perhaps it can and it's just tricky. After having devoted years to writing, the poet remains uncertain and speculates that uncertainty is not so bad and is preferable to knowing. Between the person and the poet, Still on Earth presents the angel who seems to have the same father that the person and the poet had. The two fathers are too close for comfort. For the angel, we must imagine a being with no experience of the physical suddenly confronted with the demands of the body, a being both naèive and worldly-otherworldly. The angel has been here before. In Romtvedt's reckoning, we all have. It's just hard to remember"--