Woods and the City

Woods and the City is a new collection of poems by the American poet, Peter, WeltnerAs Agenda’s W.S. Milne writes, 'Weltner’s poetry resists the post-content, post-intellectual, post-memory culture we seem to be living in today, succeeding through his writing in making us feel human again. He is a believer in human reason and dignity, as well as the bright necessity of passion....His poems extol the virtues of the free and beautiful human being in an age of 'ravaged conventions.' Woods: nature, the green world, freedom, wilderness, flowing streams and lakes, mapless, a place to get lost in, shadowy and dark, primeval, pastoral, the world of first things, timeless, inhuman, unchanging. The city: civilization, art, history, order patterned streets and aspiring buildings, laws and customs, the endless movement of people, a human place, transient, time-haunted, ever-changing. Such is the opposition long proposed between country and court, the forest and the metropolis. But the poems in Woods and the City imagine the two not as opposed, but as part of one sojourn, like a life wandering between worlds, unknowing, in search of home.