Dilemmas of Angels by David Romtvedt

In Dilemmas of the Angels, David Romtvedt journeys through the whole of a life, writing a world into being where ‘there’s an angel for every little thing,’ for all that is about us: snowdrifts and butcher blocks, the joy of camping in a snow-hut with a daughter on a winter night at twenty-six below, church pews ‘ruined under a rain of machete blows,’ and a dance hall in Zaire that remains open as the bombs fall. There is an astonishing sensibility at work here: wise, awake, quizzical, and joined felicitously to exceptional poetic gifts. The book’s central question is ‘how short life is/ and what is the best thing to do with it.’ Remarkably, these poems provide an answer. Read and by guided by all the winged messenger within, human, avian and celestial. Even the fish fly herein, even we are winged. This is a work for our times, even if by lucky coincidence. –Carolyn Forché, author of Blue Hour

In David Romtvedt’s seventh collection, Dilemmas of the Angels, the intersections of the public and private, and the global and local, are explored with a focus on the strangeness of everyday life. Throughout, the bonds and challenges of parenthood and marriage underscore larger questions about one’s place in space and time, as well as the tensions between the worldly and the divine.

Romtvedt, Poet laureate emeritus of Wyoming, shows an appreciation for the distinct mountainous landscape of his adopted home, a setting paired with accounts of Nicaragua, Rwanda and the Congo, to produce a remarkably diverse but intrinsically connected planet.

A mediation on the ever-present need to balance the materiality of our exterior lives with the riches of our spiritual ones, Dilemmas of the Angels is a masterful testament to a very human struggle.