THE RETURN OF WHAT’S BEEN LOST Stories and Peoms
by PETER WELTNER
“The mood, the music, of Peter Weltner’s The Return of What’s Been Lost is often elegiac. Memory in these stories and poems broods over what inevitably is present mostly as absence. But the book rejects what some might think of as the self-indulgent sadness of the elegiac mood. The Return of What’s Been Lost confronts what can’t last, what is necessarily mortal, and reflects upon its characters’ deeds and words and its poems’ voices with a tragic spirit. That is, it understands how joy and love may exist within mourning and sorrow, how each sustains and deepens the other. Each life in it dwells at once in the present and in a kind of enduring past. ‘How much the dead must miss us,’ the narrator of “Return of the Fallen” thinks, ‘to imprint their lives on ours.’” David Morris
“Peter Weltner pursues the difficulties of living and dying with unflinching precision and grace. The stories and poems in THE RETURN OF WHAT’S BEEN LOST, restore us to the world of physical appetites and spiritual questions; a boy dives into a lake, a soldier returns from war, and we hear a ‘voice undying despite the sea dividing us.’ Our longings ring like music from this work, and what a fine song it is.” Barbara Roether