A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know by David Romtvedt

Selected for the National Poetry series by John Haines, this volume includes family history and poems about childhood as well as work informed by Romtvedt’s ( Moon ) adult experiences: his opposition to the draft during the Vietnam War, his work in the Peace Corps in Africa and his protest against the Trident nuclear submarine base on Puget Sound. Happily, the poems are free of polemics. Rather, they demonstrate Romtvedt’s sympathy for the spectrum of humanity, from the nameless victims of Guatemalan terrorism to Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in Stalin’s Gulag. One of the most compelling poems describes how the poet’s grandmother and her sisters were forced as children to stand in a row in their living room while their father aimed a rifle at them. The poem ends with the haunting refrain, “It was winter and we skated, the ice so clear it was blue.” Technically, the volume is eclectic. The opening poem is written in a deadpan and prosaic voice, but the title poem, with its dreamy image of a flower floating in darkness, is surreal. Although the language is well chosen and seems musically correct throughout, the numerous shifts of voice and sensibility are troubling.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

“When I was a boy the neighbor/ across the street built a bomb shelter.” Romtvedt’s work is at once personal and political, an awkward mix for most poets, but he manages to come down on issues and still keep himself and his experiences at the center of the poem. Besides the bomb, he addresses such contemporary topics as a “peace blockade,” a nuclear accident in the Ukraine, and a Trident submarine jockeying for position in the Straits of Juan de Fuca near Bangor, Washington: “The air is the same air/ I breathed in Paradise/ and Buchenwald.” Romtvedt travels from Hiroshima to Guatemala, from Zaire and Rwanda to Arkansas, collecting people and their stories. He is Everyman (and woman): His poems make it easy to recognize our common stake in world affairs. Highly recommended for anyone who reads poetry seriously.
– Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.