About the Book
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
About the Author :
Peter Mladinic lives in Hobbs, New Mexico. He was born and raised in New Jersey and has lived in the Midwest and in the South. He enlisted in the United States Navy and served for four years. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1985, and taught English for thirty years at New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs. He has edited two books: Love, Death, and the Plains, and Ethnic Lea: Southeast New Mexico Stories, which are available from the Lea County Museum Press, as are three volumes of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington. His most recent book, Knives on a Table was published by Better Than Starbucks Publications in 2021. He is a past board member of the Lea County Museum and a former president of the Lea County Humane Society. An animal advocate, he supports numerous animal rescue groups. Two of his main concerns are to bring an end to the euthanizing of animals in shelters and to help get those animals adopted into caring homes.
Review :
This work speaks with the authority of lived experience combined with the tenderness of the open listening heart. Whether longing to relay an epiphany to a lost love, remembering moments shared with the dead, illuminating an incident of injustice, abandonment, violence, or pain, each poem moves in collaboration with Self, Other, Spirit, and Time. Their specificity evokes the reader's own versions of such youthful wonders as dropping acid in the Frank Mobile while reminding us of the sheer miracle of human survival. To read this collection is to take an epic American road trip with a wild array of companions. Although the stories told are often difficult to hear, they invite us to celebrate our own lives and to resist despair.
- Caroline Goodwin, author of Madrigals and Old Snow, White Sun.
Early on in Voices from the Past Peter Mladinic set down some prescriptive rules for dealing with memory and loss. In the poem "If" Mladinic tells us: "If you don't go where they are and knock / they'll go on with their lives. / Should some sight or sound remind them of you / it will be you don't care, you never loved them. / You tell yourself approaching that shore / I love, loved and will love them. They are better / left alone, going on as they have been / since the morning I set out from the mainland. / I had to. That much was clear." For my money, the poet is cataloguing Existence-as in the poem "Reciprocity" that assembly is a dialogue that begins: "If you help me get what I want I'll help / you, Ethel, one of the dead, / cold in your grave, wanting everything." The poet is saying what others are thinking, of the Spirits of the Dead: If you'll help me, I'll make you visible again. Which is what Mladinic does with small dogs and great boxers-he brings the world that is passing, and has passed to never return, into view with no small degree of reverence for the true-ish as well as the truth. Not to understate the whimsy of "Autobiography," saying: "An autobiography / of a lizard should contain the lizard's preferred / bowling team, it's preferred soup and rainforest." And so it should.
- Roy Bentley, author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City, and Starlight Taxi.
Peter Mladinic's finely textured, crisply detailed poems reconstruct a past that despite or because of its individuality chimes with everyone's past. He shows us how the dust and debris stashed in the corners of our minds, the people we loved and lost in the dark, the places we passed through and forgot, remain with us, invoked in a muscular flow of syntax and living verbs.
- William Doreski, author of The Suburbs of Atlantis and Mist in Their Eyes.
