At Home on This Moveable Earth

Writing of a life ruled, like most, by the elements, William Kloefkorn has already given us "This Death by Drowning" (water) and "Restoring the Burnt Child" (fire). In this third installment of his projected four-part memoir, the poet focuses on earth in exploring in the most personal terms the perpetual human struggle between building foundations and abandoning them, digging in and moving on. Whether writing about a boyhood in the Great Depression, the bond between a young man and his family, digging storm cellars and ducking tornadoes, or the dropping of the atomic bomb as experienced by a paperboy in small-town Kansas, Kloefkorn brings a congenial mixture of seriousness and humor to his subjects. Here and there, the commonplace lends itself to the not-so-common question: What is the odd relationship between power, terror, and beauty? Why are human beings torn between staying put and moving - in intellectual and spiritual as well as physical terms? And how much of who we are is composed of who we were? Rife with insight, "At Home on This Moveable Earth" is as wonderfully readable as the first two volumes of Kloefkorn's memoirs, a thoughtful tour of a curious character's life so far and a model of retrospective introspection. William Kloefkorn is Nebraska's state poet and a professor emeritus of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is the author of many volumes of poetry and two previous memoirs, "This Death by Drowning" and "Restoring the Burnt Child", both published by the University of Nebraska Press.