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

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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)