A Kiss in Space: Poems

Description

From the first poem, which takes us up in a hot-air balloon over Chartres, to the last, in which a Russian cosmonaut welcomes an American colleague onto the Mir space station, Mary Jo Salter's exhilarating fourth collection draws the reader into the long distances of the imagination and the intimacies of the heart. Poignant poems about her own past--such as "Libretto," in which a childhood initiation into opera merges with a family drama--are set against historical poems such as "The Seven Weepers," where a nineteenth-century English explorer in Australia comes face-to-face with the Aborigines his own people have doomed to decimation. The book's centerpiece, "Alternating Currents," juxtaposes real historical figures like Alexander Graham Bell and Helen Keller with their fictional contemporaries Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, as each of them plumbs the mysteries of perception. Along the way are poems on family life, on films (from home movies to Hollywood romances), on travel in France, and on works of art (from a child's fingerpainted refrigerator magnet to Titian's last painting).

In this splendid and engaging collection, Mary Jo Salter pays homage with wit and compassion to the precious dailiness of life on earth, while gazing tantalizingly beyond its boundaries to view such wondrous events as a kiss in space.

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Encapsulated within each of Mary Jo Salter's poems is a story. There are characters (the poet, her children, her parents, friends) and events (a balloon ride outside of Paris, an afternoon spent listening to Puccini, an evening in front of the television). And there is a strong narrative theme--enough to fill a whole novel--in every poem. In "Libretto," for example, Salter describes her first introduction to opera under her mother's tutelage, foreshadowing within the first few lines the melancholy end of this story: "but why are we alone? / Were Daddy and my brothers gone / all day, or has memory with its flair / for simple compositions air- / brushed them from the shot?" Mother and daughter sit on "an ivory silk couch that doesn't fit / the life she's given in Detroit" and listen to the strains of Madame Butterfly while gazing out the window at the neighbors' two-car garages. Ominously, Salter reports, "It's 1962 / and though I'm only eight, I know / that with two cars, people can separate."

Some of Salter's most powerful poems concentrate on the prosaic: "A Leak Somewhere" describes a family watching an old movie about the Titanic on television. But Salter invests even this safe domestic drama with vague unease as the parents, having put the children to bed, are overcome with a sense

that hidden in the house a fine
crack--nothing spectacular,
only a leak somewhere--is slowly
widening to claim each of us
in random order, and we start to rock
in one another's arms.

These poems are deceptively simple: one doesn't have to read them several times to understand their point. Yet the intelligence behind them--the careful choice of images, the way detail upon detail accretes like amber hardening around an insect to form a whole universe in microcosm--makes these very complex works, indeed. A Kiss in Space is eloquent, elegant, and a pleasure to read and reread. --Alix Wilber

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Open Shutters: Poems

Description

Mary Jo Salter’s sparkling new collection, Open Shutters, leads us into a world where things are often not what they seem. In the first poem, “Trompe l’Oeil,” the shadow-casting shutters on Genoese houses are made of paint only, an “open lie.” And yet “Who needs to be correct / more often than once a day? / Who needs real shadow more than play?”

Open Shutters also calls to mind the lens of a camera—in the villanelle “School Pictures” or in the stirring sequence “In the Guesthouse,” which, inspired by photographs of a family across three generations, offers at once a social history of America and a love story.

Darkness and light interact throughout the book—in poems about September 11; about a dog named Shadow; about a blind centenarian who still pretends to read the paper; about a woman shaken by the death of her therapist. A section of light verse highlights the wit and grace that have long distinguished Salter’s most serious work.

Fittingly, the volume fools the eye once more by closing with “An Open Book,” in which a Muslim family praying at a funeral seek consolation in the pages formed by their upturned palms.

Open Shutters is the achievement of a remarkable poet, whose concerns and stylistic range continue to grow, encompassing ever larger themes, becoming ever more open.

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A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems

Description

This “wholly attractive volume” that brings together twenty-five years of “elegantly shaped and voiced creations” (William Pritchard, The Boston Globe) offers a generous sampling of Mary Jo Salter’s five previous award-winning volumes and a collection of superb new poems. A mid-career retrospective of one of the major poets of her generation.

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Sunday Skaters: Poems

Description

A third collection of poems highlights tones of playfulness, wisdom, compassion, and profundity while following a woman's deeply personal journeys through love, family, place, and time. Reprint.

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Selected Poems

Description

When Amy Clampitt’s first collection, The Kingfisher, was published, it was hailed as that rare first book that “signals a major poet in full bloom” (Los Angeles Times). Its author was sixty-three years old. Over the next eleven years, Clampitt produced four additional, major collections. Now, the most essential poems from these five volumes are gathered together.

Clampitt was an impassioned observer of the natural world, the delights of which color many of these poems: writing of the fog, she described “a stuff so single / it might almost be lifted, / folded over, crawled underneath / or slid between, as nakedness- / caressingsheets.” Such was the texture of her language, too. She was a traveler, reporting back from England and Greece, from California and Maine, and from her native Midwest. An Iowa transplant to New York, the descendant of pioneers, she wrote of prairies and subways; of the movements of wildflowers, people, and ideas; and of the widespread modern experience of uprootedness.

Here is a treasure of Amy Clampitt’s verse, for those who are reading her for the first time, as well as for those who have long admired her.

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HENRY PURCELL IN JAPAN (Knopf Poetry Series)

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