Penelope opens this superb collection, but Weltner’s Penelope, unlike the wily Homeric spouse, stands as a figure for weaving and unweaving as a rich poetic labor: shuttling among persons and myths, age and youth, culture and nature, logos and eros. 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. Weltner is a bold poet of old age who, like Yeats and William Carlos Williams, gives no quarter to nostalgia.
David Morris,
author or Eros and Illness
Masterful! In You Wait For Me Where Mountain Peaks Are White As Your Hair, Peter Weltner reveals all epochs and eras as contemporaneous, as living in the pebble and the seed; in the discoveries, the joys, and the pains of sexual awakening; in love lost and found where least expected; in the shadows of cultural taboos and in exile from the self. The poems map the enduring struggle to reclaim what is ours and let go, to integrate what’s passed down, what’s unknown, and what’s given. Weltner’s agile, passionate ear guides and clarifies imagination, as the poems’ emotional truths dance to an intricate, organic music, delicate, tidal. Between these misty mountains and Thargelion, our listening becomes a means of engaging mythic realities, grasping the “shining impossible,” and experiencing the warp and the woof of the wilderness within us.
William O’Daly,
Translator of Pablo Neruda’s Book of Twilight and author of Yarrow and Smoke
OTHER BOOKS BY PETER WELTNER
How The Body Prays Graywold Press 1988
The Risk Of His Music Graywolf Press 1997
The One-Winged Body Marrowstone Press 2011
Where Everything Is Water As Far As He Can See Marrowstone Press 2012
The Outerlands BrickHouse Books 2012
To The Final Cinder BrickHouse Books 2013
Water’s Eye Marrowstone Press 2015
Late Summer Storm In Early Winter Marrowstone Press 2015
Stone Altars BrickHouse Books 2015
The Return Of What’s Been Lost Marrowstone Press 2017
The Light Of The Sun Become Sea BrickHouse Books 2017
Unbecoming Time Marrowstone Press 2017
