Stone Altars - Tapa blanda

Stone Altars is a book of poems by an aging man still engaged in asking fundamental questions, never to be answered, which have haunted him since boyhood. It is a poetry of sea, sun, and sky, trees, rocks, streams, and hills, of loss, time, death, and memory, friends, lovers, and families. It seeks in forms the resonance they offer from the past, how their sounds and shapes expand meaning beyond what words alone can say. It searches in stories and writings from various sacred traditions for images and metaphors which can still be borrowed for serious thought in poetry today. The old questions suffice and endure: mortality, the brevity of all human life, but particularly of youth, the tragic beauty of the world, love's pain and beneficence, the call to compassion. These are the themes that recur in Stone Altars, that its poems brood about and ponder in ways always attentive to the particular, faithful to Pound's great admonition: Go in fear of abstractions.

Always moving, sometimes heartrending, Weltner's poetry captures what it is to be human. It is a humane poetry without artificiality, a poetry that accepts, without reservation, the whipsaw of joy and pain we all must live through. Despite its title there are no cinders here but live coals glowing with life. -- Bradley R. Strahan, editor, Visions International; author of This Art of Losing. Formal. Beautiful. Tough. Intricate. Musical. In love with language and music. Romantic. Strong. Homoerotic. Intelligent. Excellent. Flowing. Tight.Descriptive. Narrative. Emotional. Internal world of memory and imagination. Dedication. Serious. Dedication to beauty. Meaning. Formal. Excessive. Glamorous. Finds love and passion in the sea, hunger in dust. Urgent. Moral. Difficult. Strong and painful. Loss. Beauty rescues. Desire. Symphonic. Sad. Ambitious. Large and brave. I feel breathless and sad that the world I live in doesn't care or is avoiding the size, scale, bounty, moral rigor, and passion of our lives that can be found here. -- Linda Gregg, author of All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems