Suite Dolomiti, by O. Alan Weltzien

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Suite Dolomiti distills Weltzien’s experience of the Dolomites based on a September trek, with three friends, on the Alta Via II, a challenging route just over 100 miles. Weltzien, a mountains fanatic all his life, tries to come to terms with this famous range in northeastern Italy—a UNESCO World Heritage Site (2009). There is no more beautiful a range, in his international experience, than the Dolomites.

Suite Dolomiti uses the notion of a musical suite—a Baroque dance suite or a 19th-century suite with a series of movements, more loosely constructed than a symphony—as an organizing metaphor for this series of twenty-one poems. Thus, each poem is defined, in part, by an Italian tempo marking that is suitable for each poem. The tempi vary as do the subjects and lengths and shapes of the poems.

These poems range across the natural landscapes of the Dolomites as well as the human landscape: transient friends in rifugios (mountain huts) with many languages and backgrounds. Yet all belong to the same tribe. The poems vary in perspective from panoramic survey to close foreground, just beyond one’s shoes. For anyone who has loved mountainscapes, the Dolomites and Suite Dolomiti should hold deep appeal.

Weltzien, a retired English professor in Montana, still travels a lot with his wife, Lynn. He has published five chapbooks and eleven books within the past thirty years. These include a memoir, A Father and an Island (Lewis-Clark Press, 2008) and three full-length poetry collections, most recently On The Beach: Poems 2016 - 2021 (Cirque Press, 2022). Recent work includes a prose chapbook, The Taylor Triptych (The Sea Letter journal, no. 12, winter 2024) and a poetry chapbook, Into The Khumbu (Cirque Press, 2025). Weltzien still loves to ski, backpack, and even try and summit peaks.