Peter Weltner

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.

Heidegger extolled language as the "house of being" but Peter Weltner in this exquisite and deeply moving new collection finds it "betrayed by lies spouted each moment in every known tongue." Daring "to be ceremonial" in face of our constitutive dishonesty, Weltner's poetic craft is revelatory, allowing the singular things of the world to show themselves. Weltner's temporal horizon is "unbecoming" in two ways. On the one hand, it is the wistful, implacable, and often elegiac flow of time--"Most of the men I knew then have died. Every day I think of them." And "Why must I leave you, the earth I love?" as even "memory's streams" are "fated to flow seaward." On the other hand, these poems enact a powerful unbecoming of time, momentarily halting its flow so that the silent preciousness of the past becomes audible. These are compassionate, appreciative yet doleful epiphanies in which the grace of what has been comes forth as it is also slipping away. "One last, uncertain glimpse of earth is all I ask from dying: to leave the life I love, forgiven and forgiving." This is a book to help us with our living and dying in a time of seemingly endless chatter.Jason M. Wirth, Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University, author of Mountains, Rivers and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis

Remembering Steve Abbott Dan Calder Doug Carter Gerry Coletti William Dickey Martin Fleischer Ron Garner Don Gillis Jay Hayes Jim Holloran Ross Marbury Michael Rubin George Stambolian Steve Steinberg Shelby Topp Deb Watkins and... Long before it started, people had claimed the land from the dead below San Francisco whose bodies were re-buried in Colma. New storms have blown the sand off broken tombstones from the last two centuries that like discarded manhole covers, ruined pediments, dug up foundations, concrete slabs were tossed for breakwater on the beach. The sea never relents. Every few years, it exposes the names of the lost. This morning, two gulls fell on the Embarcadero, dead, white, plump, unbloodied. Their fellows overhead circled and keened, their looping bodies, dawn bright, clouding the blue sky, wings flapping as in a rite, their cries like rhymes, as the tides take form from regrets and mourning is the wind that blows through sonnets