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)

And They Reached Out Their Hands in Longing for the Distant Shore

Literature & Fiction

Weltner, Peter

Poetry

Marrowstone Press

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.

Antiquary: poems and stories

Bird and Tree/In Place 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.

BIRD and TREE / IN PLACE

Scrapbook Mappings of My Country

Woods and the City is a new collection of poems by the American poet, Peter, Weltner 
As 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."\nWoods: 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.

Woods and the City

Water's Eye is a small but stunning book of poetry by Peter Weltner and photographs by artist Galen Garwood. This suite of six long poems by Weltner are poetic responses to Garwood's enigmatic photographs, offering a creative collaboration both mythic and contemporary, charged with illuminated metaphors of sea and light and longing. This is their third book of poetry and art; Water's Eye, 2015, The One Winged Body, 2011, and Where Everything is Water As Far As He Can See, 2012 are published by Marrowstone Press.

Water's Eye

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Galen Garwood

The Return of What's Been Lost

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

Unbecoming Time

Identity and Difference

Crossing Press

United States

Crossing Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weltner, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Weltner, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weltner, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

And They Reached Out Their Hands in Longing for the Distant Shore

Antiquary: poems and stories

BIRD and TREE / IN PLACE

Scrapbook Mappings of My Country

Woods and the City

Water's Eye

The Return of What's Been Lost

Unbecoming Time

Identity and Difference

Identity and Difference