Joe Enzweiler's A Winter on Earth confirms what readers of his four previous collections already know: Enzweiler is the real thing, an authentic maker, not a manufacturer, of poems. Between first snow and first rain, poem and prose poem, nature and human nature, the reader will find, to paraphrase a line from "Woodsplitting," two halves gathered in this single whole. This is a book for everyone's essential poetry shelf. -Jerah Chadwick, Alaska State Writer Laureate, 2004-2006