Bookshelf
Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.
Old Songs Replayed by Peter Weltner ’64
March 20, 2025
Tags Alumni Book
(Marrowstone Press, 2024)
In this, his fifth self-declared “last book” of poems (this time he probably means it!), Weltner devotes the first half to reflections on his time at Hamilton. The collection that fills the section “Late Winter Snow on College Hill” is dedicated to members of his Class of 1964 and in memory of his longtime friend Sam Crowl ’62.
According to the author: “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.”