The Seasons of a Poetic Wanderer

Review of Peter W. Petschauer’s Seasons — Of Life and Of Understanding (Perspektiven Presse, 2024), ISBN 979-8326187512, 105 pages, softbound, $16.51.

In his third book of poetry, Peter Petschauer continues his journey through the landscapes and mindscapes of personal, family, and collective history and the search for meaningful moments. Petschauer’s poetic voices resonate autobiographically, but his compassionate and deep listening to “rarely heard voices” includes the care of nature, the empathic embrace of human life in its various stages of development, and a psychohistorical understanding of the tragedies and hopes of humankind.

In the field of poetry, Petschauer cites the Japanese master of haiku and renku (linked poetry that’s part of a collaboration between two or more poets) poetry Matsuo Bashō and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as his models. For Petschauer, poems are comprehensive ways of tentatively knowing and feeling the breathing phenomena of life and their changing relationships. In addition to the poems, his new work includes an introductory essay on Bashō and the writing of poetry. Petschauer admits that some of his own poems belong to the “pure” poetry category (p. 15). Howard Stein has classified this as the complex, self-referential use of language for its own sake without addressing human suffering.

However, most of Petschauer’s poems clearly belong to the “applied” or practical poetry that Stein characterizes as engaging the reader’s heart, witnessing suffering, offering reflection, and evoking lived and vivid experiences. Petschauer combines narrative or prose poetry with free-flowing poetry that reaches existential-experiential dimensions without following abstract theoretical guidelines. His poetic journey, while fixing “the place, the time, the season, perhaps even the time of day, and of course the object itself” (p. 12), offers an open dialogue for shifting interpretations.

Petschauer’s idea of writing poetry is “to express joyful, mean-

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ingful and difficult thoughts and encounters with friends, acquaintances and distant men and women who uplift or terrorize our lives” (p. 14). Affectionate dedication to his psychohistorical colleagues and their contributions are part of Petschauer’s empathic approach. Such friendly encounters are attached in this work to the sections of poetry that manage to create perspectives on a wide spectrum of passages and transitions in human life and history, not through any dogmatic claims but by accompanying “Tentacles of other times / reaching into the present” (p. 34). There is also a lament for our “crying world” and “uprooted” people and nature. “Waves of discontent” permeate political, social, cultural, and economic issues in this volume.

By writing from the margins, Petschauer succeeds in finding and exploring essential questions, times, and spaces. I associate Petschauer’s poems with Paul Celan’s (1986) ideas about poetry in his speech “The Meridian” (pp. 49-50). For Celan, poems keep their open and free spaces of conversation, engage the readers, and question in the present moment “where-from and where-to,” or move from an “already-no-more” into a “still-here.” Like Celan, Petschauer, with his sense of joyful and desperate existence, uses the language of one person seeking the figures of another and is aware of all our dates and seasons: “Tentacles of other times / reaching into the present. / The illusion of remaining young, / except when a mirror tells us otherwise” (p. 34). Poets speak, as Celan (1986) claimed, “from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature” (p. 49).

Even Petschauer’s most personal and concise poems contain sensations, sounds, and memories that expand the scene into entanglements with culture, history, politics, and ethics. There is no naïve optimism, but neither is there a cynical attitude. Petschauer does not deny ambiguity and ambivalence, for example, in his connection to his father’s traumatic life. Nevertheless, the poems are presented as means of reorientation, as itineraries through which affective, multidirectional memories emerge in the present concerning different individuals, groups, and environments.

Poems are temporally layered. They hide and reveal: “People plagued with memories of another time, / chafe at tendencies of today, / hidden behind barricades of denial, / their past breaks out in arresting torrents” (p. 71). As such, poems function as creations for imagining further—toward possible futures.

The poetic wanderer is a wise observer who marvels at the wonderful moments and embraces the sad memories. While all things must pass, the voices of the past continue to reach out to the future. Hope is not stuck in the abyss; loneliness moves toward surprising encounters: “Except on occasion, / we recognize our common humanity and cross the span” (p. 70). It also accepts the fate of retirement, being alone with one’s thoughts and feelings: “The moment we leave our work, / we are

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dead in the minds of those who follow. / Long before we close our eyes – / we are buried in theirs” (p. 38). Nevertheless, what has been expressed long ago is still here, questioning, attending, missing, and searching for verve. Besides the poems, the photographs in Petschauer’s book of traveling words tell their own fascinating stories, encouraging us to move further toward vistas of creative imagination.

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