
Unbecoming Time
Peter Weltner(Author)
Marrowstone Press
Published on 15. November 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
116 pages
978-0-692-97619-7 (ISBN)
Description
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 D¿gen in an Age of Ecological Crisis
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
190 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-692-97619-7 (9780692976197)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Peter Weltner has published five previous books of fiction, including The Risk of His Music and How the Body Prays, five poetry chapbooks, among them The One-Winged Body and Water's Eye (both in collaboration with the artist Galen Garwood), and six full length collections of poetry, News from the World at My Birth: A History, The Outerlands, To the Final Cinder, Stone Altars, Late Summer Storm in Early Winter (with photographs and paintings by Galen Garwood), and most recently The Light of the Sun Become Sea. He and his husband live in San Francisco by the ocean.