Old Songs Replayed is a book of and about memories: how they inevitably translate the past into the present and, herein lies one of the mysteries of history, the present into the past. It is composed of four sections, the first about a college in upstate New York in the early 1960s, about learning and the knowledge of other worlds; the second consists of a necessarily brief and newly rendered and imagined anthology of poets and poetry from some of its inceptions to the beginnings of modernism; the third of revised poems the poet thought of as remaindered, but has now refurbished; and the fourth a kind of epilogue in which the poet finds his late life last reflections best voiced in imitations of ancient ones, in the way old and new are constantly being rhymed and replayed.
"Peter Weltner's agile, passionate ear guides and clarifies imagination, as the poems' emotional truths dance to intricate, organic music, delicate, tidal." William O'Daly, author of The New Gods, Beltway Editions