A Guest In All Your Houses

~ By Peter Ludwin ~

In this highly evocative first collection, award-winning poet Peter  Ludwin explores themes of history and culture, as well as the power of land and place to shape aesthetic vision.  Set entirely in the American West from the Great Basin to the Great Plains, this is a  book with a strong spiritual core.  By turns meditative and  freewheeling, it reflects the joy and passion of being engaged with a  beckoning world.  As the title suggests, the poet approaches his subject in all its manifest diversity with the outlook of a privileged guest for whom each experience is never sufficient just for itself.   Rather, these encounters are signposts on a path to a world sustained by invitation and a poet's deft interpretation of the road.

In these poems is a spirit that dives into prairie grasses and travels among root systems and bones before surfacing to speak in visionary tongues: telling fortunes from the frozen moons of fingernails; speaking in the grainy, sepia-toned voices of windblown wives in hardscrabble 19th century Kansas; blues-tuning in Colorado and  filtering New Mexico through a new language that flutters and swirls on wind that stings like a knife.  "What use for history?" Peter Ludwin asks in "Bluestem," but in this book of fundamentalists and hippies, conquistadors and Anasazi spirits, history is the ghost in the land and the settlers' steel plow.  It is what makes this gorgeous book of gorgeous poems into a vision ringing like white bone, built from the earth like adobe and crafted out of the transcendent West: "...a  ballet of blood moons/splashing a haunted piano." 

 --Tony Barnstone, author of
 The Golem of Los Angeles, Sad Jazz and Impure

"With a voice informal and direct, Peter Ludwin evokes a world where people, geography and time overlap like waves, washing around and through one another.  Often journeying into landscapes that initially appear barren of elements from which to draw solace, he finds a harsh beauty that sharpens the contours of the lives of those he encounters there.  Memory is key for him in deepening the connections of people, including himself, to the terrains they inhabit.  And history--which he clearly sees is the land's form of memory--is always present, influencing everything, even when invisible to the casual observer.  This American writer feels strongly the press of other cultures and languages--from the Anasazi and conquistadors to modern artists, from Sanskrit and Greek to Spanish and Japanese--shaping the age in which we all now live.  As he says in "Night Hike, Chihuahuan Desert," 'What the ocean/that once frothed here/left, we inhale.'  Ludwin's poems breathe deeply."

--Michael Spence, author of Spine,
Purdue University Press


It would be enough were Peter Ludwin's A Guest in All Your Houses merely a sensual, spiritual geography of the human heart.  But so much more, this breathtaking first collection of poems is an opulent, operatic score of the American West.  These are poems filled with deep experience, bold imagery and reverent observation.  Music and soul abound on every page, as in these lines from "Midnight, Steens Mountain:" "This hour/the hawk's own vespers/feeds on the unsuspecting.//Fingers the shiny mandolin/dangling from its belt of stars."

--Lana Hechtman Ayers, author,
Publisher of Concrete Wolf Chapbook Series