Böcker av Peter Mladinic

Voices from the Past is about memory. It's about beauty, loss, destruction, despair, and joy. It's about things both local and universal, the individual and the community. Its words represent people, places, things of yesterday and today. It's a book about reflecting on the past to live well in the present.How something is said is equally as important as what is said. Poems in Voices from the Past are spoken in the poet's voice and in the voices of others, characters who muddle through perplexities, who inhabit a world in which there are no easy answers.It's a book about the self alone and with others, and universal verities such as cowardice, courage, envy, pride, sacrifice, hope, fear, unconditional and imperfect love. It's about suffering and joy, about what it means to remember and what it means to be human. The illogical coexists with the logical, the mundane with the profound. The extraordinary is found in the ordinary. It's about looking back and going forward.The poems aim to show the dignity of all people, and of all living things. Being a book about lives at once ordinary and uncommon, special in varied ways, the poems reflect any one person's moods at particular times, and any one person's life's journey at particular times. Religion, art, music, politics, gender, race and nature are some of the concerns in these poems. Language itself is a concern, language as a medium of communication from one individual to another, and from one individual to a group or a community. The poems are about tangible things and human situations, about relationships and about how individuals see themselves. The abiding notion is we live in a world with others who are both near and far.What one does, or does not do impacts others. Words have consequences and words redeem.Poetry itself has the power of redemption. Some years ago a poet said that poetry brought him back to life. The poems in this book have that high aim, to give hope, to enhance the quality of a person's life, to find out of despair joy, out of misery happiness, out of restlessness solace.86 poems, 118 pages

A collection of 62 intensely atmospheric poems.In this richly varied collection, Peter Mladinic''s myriad voices reveal his extraordinary gift for lyric storytelling. The speakers in his fresh and unexpected dramatic monologues populate a universe of recognizably American experience, telling of joys and horrors, childhood memories, murders committed, lovers desired and lost, lives fractured, heartbreak endured and survived (or not). An always believable surrealism of the everyday sometimes takes us into the dream life of families, births and deaths, moments full of illumination and love, sorrow and exhilaration. Mladinic''s poems are all about the inescapable reality of others whom he fully imagines in all their unforgettable poignance and irrepressible vitality. His disciplined, energetic, highly pressured free verse and brilliant attention to local detail celebrate life - its tragedy, its comedy, its romance and abundance - all the while taking into account, with the deepest compassion, the relentless passage of time.- Elizabeth Frank, Pulitzer Prize winner in 1986 for her biography Louise Bogan: A Portrait.