Product 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #514554 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-15
• Released on: 2009-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375711565
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Celebrated since the 1980s for her deftly articulate, often wittily rhymed lyric poems, Salter demonstrates those strengths and others in this sixth volume. From the start, Salter's verse can sound urbane and serious, ceremonious and supple: a nine-part elegy for a friend who died young contains a villanelle with the refrain I know you're gone for good. And this is how:/ were you alive, you would have called by now. Other poems react to the death of Salter's mother, to her own experience of parenthood, and to life with her husband, poet and critic Brad Leithauser. Salter may be the most gifted mid-career disciple of James Merrill's work, and her detractors may say she still works in his shadow. Yet her loosely syllabic stanzas owe as much to Marianne Moore, and her best poems stand apart for their careful sensitivity both to works of art and to her own family life, sounding as much herself when sighing, you reach an age when classics// are what you must have read as when she imagines the synchronized operations/ across the neighborhood:/ putting the children to bed;/ laying out clean clothes. (Mar.)
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Review
“Only a few poets transcend the history of taste to participate in the history of art—and only in a handful of poems. Salter has been struck by lightning more than once.” —James Longenbach, The New York Times Book Review

“Poems that are deeply human, brilliantly realized, and refreshingly perceptive.” —Julie Hale, BookPage

About the Author
Mary Jo Salter is the author of five previous books of poetry and a children’s book, The Moon Comes Home. She is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She divides her time between Amherst, Massachusetts, and Baltimore.

Customer Reviews

Some new precise pieces from a master
There are few poets like I look forward to new poems by with as much anticipation as those by MJS. This collection will not disappoint--unless, like me, your reaction is going to be skip the selected work; I want to enjoy the crafted pieces by a master poet. While there are only a handful of new poems, I did do what I always promise myself but rarely follow up on: I revisited a few favorites and forgotten pieces from her earlier volumes. Some readers may lament that the poems are selected and not collected, for me it was a fine blend of new and old material. If MJS's work is new to you, you'll have the joy of discovering material from her previous collections; if you've been following her work all along, you'll be happy to read the grouping that starts the collection. Everything MJS publishes is poetry of the highest order.