Böcker av Peter Weltner

Spare Change for the Crossing, A Last Hike In, and A Last Look Back compose a trilogy of books, recollective in several senses and thematically intertwined, which Peter Weltner wrote in his eightieth and eighty-first years. He regards them together as his final book, a kind of culmination of a lifetime of thought and experience.

Following soon after the publication of A Last Hike In, A Last Look Back is its sequel and complement, both books are about trekking into what Keats called "the old oak Forest" while recalling earlier and similar journeys, real and imaginary, the poet has made before. In both books, Peter Weltner continues to explore how images from the past, of place, and of passion, recurrently rhyme with the present.

A Last Hike In is a book of late life, of a writer's returning to his sources in wildernesses, the untamed places of the heart, of solitude and passion and love, and in the deep pasts of myths and ancient history as he continues his lifelong search for meaning, for what stays, the essential things of which, no matter the hour, we still have so much to say, so much there's left to tell. It is a song of the earth that, like Mahler's, as it approaches the end, listens for the profound call, like a summons from within the world, of what endures, of what sustains and consoles us, as if forever.

Peter Weltner's 'An Old Man Sails a Paper Boat, a Chapbook, ' is a collection of twenty-four poems, is an evocation of age, of memories...." There's a streak of stubbornness in the old. Such cold is what his poetry celebrates now he's out of time and maybe luck, the strange chill of age he's known from the long ago day he was born, the nip of fall in all he has ever loved and lost, the poems he's chiseled as if from ice, the wintry world he understands best, that crystalline, that light to his touch, like a late night frost or morning sleet that to a small boy's delight melts to nothing in his hands."

In Book VI of Virgil's AENEID, as the unburied dead stand on the shore of a river waiting to be carried across, they reach out their arms in longing for the distant shore of peace. A poetry of late life, Peter Weltner's AND THEY REACHED OUT THEIR ARMS IN LONGING FOR THE DISTANT SHORE also seeks transport, as poetry often does, to a distant shore, the one of tradition, of meaning, love, and peace. It is a book that re-envisions the deep past of in the writings and history of ancient Greece, Rome, and the biblical world of Mark's gospel, for example. It does so by at the same time pondering the history of violence, in both the distant and the more recent past as a way of elucidating the present. It is a book which seeks, in a sense, longs for, the "now" that waits for us in the elusive "then" of the past in order to make a vision of peace more possible."Peter Weltner is a poet of finely tuned craft with a sensuous ear for the sound of language. His poems look directly at the world. They don't flinch in the face of loss and death; they strive, in a manner wonderfully accomplished, for transcendence." Joseph Stroud (Of This World and Everything That Rises, Copper Canyon Press)

Woods and the City is a new collection of poems by the American poet, Peter, WeltnerAs Agenda's W.S. Milne writes, "Weltner's poetry resists the post-content, post-intellectual, post-memory culture we seem to be living in today, succeeding through his writing in making us feel human again. He is a believer in human reason and dignity, as well as the bright necessity of passion....His poems extol the virtues of the free and beautiful human being in an age of "ravaged conventions." Woods: nature, the green world, freedom, wilderness, flowing streams and lakes, mapless, a place to get lost in, shadowy and dark, primeval, pastoral, the world of first things, timeless, inhuman, unchanging. The city: civilization, art, history, order patterned streets and aspiring buildings, laws and customs, the endless movement of people, a human place, transient, time-haunted, ever-changing. Such is the opposition long proposed between country and court, the forest and the metropolis. But the poems in Woods and the City imagine the two not as opposed, but as part of one sojourn, like a life wandering between worlds, unknowing, in search of home.

Bird and Tree/In Place,by Peter Weltner, is one book of poems composed of two. Its epigraph is taken from the English Romantic poet, John Clare: to "turn the blue blinders of the heavens aside/To see what gods are doing." In Weltner''s book, the gods are such fundamental powers and presences as the past, memory, human existence in place and time, passion in all its senses, and what glimpses of transcendence humanity is allowed to see. It is a poetry of quest and questioning, of a late life looking back, of form and freedom pondering those essential things long pondered before us.

LATE THOUGHTS is the most recent publication of poetry by the American poet and writer, Peter Weltner. These remarkable poems reflect the power and honesty of a poet in the fullness of his life. His poems, as described by Joseph Stroud, "...look directly at the world. They don't flinch in the face of loss and death. They strive for a transcendence where All's light, All's water, All's paradise shimmering." Or, as William O'Daly describes Weltner's poetry, "Weltner's agile, passionate ear guides and clarifies imagination, as the poems' emotional truths dance to intricate, organic music, delicate, tidal."

A mid-16th century coinage, ‘antiquary’ derives from Latin ‘ante,’ ‘before, and ‘antiquus,’ ‘former’ or ‘ancient.’  An antiquary, however, not only admires or studies old objects or books; he also copies or repeats them.  An antiquary ponders past things in part to restore them to the present.  Peter Weltner’s collection of poems and stories, Antiquary, explores pasts, both individual and historical, personal and communal, in search of what endures not as relics, not as mere collectibles or dated things, but as lasting images and values.  It seeks to find those meanings, for good or for ill, which persist through time, the abiding human desires and experiences of suffering that confound then with now.

An exciting new book of poetry by the American poet, Peter Weltner, publsihed by Marrowstone Press. Many poems, haiku-like, begin in a landscape that branches quickly into primal terrain, textual and sensual, where the past weaves its spell into a present always on the cusp of slipping away.