Synopsis "Scrapbook Mappings of my Country"
Scrapbook Mappings of My Country is a book of poems composed of many voices in many places, like snapshots saved in a scrapbook. It begins in the South, moves to the Northeast and New England, shifts to Texas and the Middle West, and then travels to the Pacific Coast. It concludes with another sort of pilgrimage, with its intimations of journeys' end. Throughout, it is concerned with one theme most of all, the intersection of place, time, and self as each speaks through the other of the meanings that bind them, and us, together.The pleasures of memory, and the particular beauties of birds and beasts and flowers and trees and seascapes and ground fog, stand always in his poetic regard and craft as not just the compensating matter of existence, but as its continual and commanding presence. Donald J. Gray, Professor Emeritus of English, Indiana University, Bloomington Peter Weltner is a poet who is a fine painter of words, an intricate, delicate analyst of emotions, and a writer who puts content, intellect and memory back on the map of poetry, undermining sterile maxims and inept clichés....His poetry celebrates nature's riches joyously and energetically, and conveys the finesse and sorrows of lovers without moralising, in a composed tone that always suggests vulnerability, sensitivity and poignancy. His lyrical grace is inimitable, his lines supple, subtle and nuanced, threaded together with a fine technical skill. Although his poems can be political he is never intent on button-holing the reader, but only in highlighting hypocrisy, humbug and cant wherever he finds it, all this whilst eschewing cynicism and the sardonic sneers we often associate with contemporary poetry, endorsing a latter-day day faith in Whitmanesque democracy. His poetry confirms that poetry can be a 'consoling blessing', and that a writer can stand up to the current contempt for reason and the poisonous ignoring of truth. It is a poetry which opposes brutality and vulgarity. One feels that there is a powerful mind at work in Peter Weltner's work, and the indefinable tenor of that mind is shown in the unique stamp of his voice. His poetry should be better known than it is. W. S. Milne, "The Poetry of Peter Weltner," Agenda Vol. 54, Nos. 1-2
