MARY JO SALTER, POET
“[Salter] . . . challenges us with the discovery that something lucid, forthright, and fantastically undisheveled might also be sublime.”
—Stephen Metcalf, New York Times Book Review
“Mary Jo Salter's work embodies the marriage of superb craftsmanship to the tragic sense of reality, which is the formula of true poetry.”—Joseph Brodsky
Mary Jo Salter was born in 1954 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She grew up in Detroit and Baltimore, and received her B.A. from Harvard, where she studied with Elizabeth Bishop. After receiving an M.A. in English from Cambridge University, she worked as a staff editor at the Atlantic monthly and, some years later, as poetry editor of the New Republic.
Salter’s sixth collection of poems, A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Knopf in the spring of 2008. It collects new work and a substantial body of poems from her previous Knopf collections: Henry Purcell in Japan (1985); Unfinished Painting, the 1989 Lamont Selection for the year’s most distinguished second volume of poetry; Sunday Skaters, nominated in 1994 for the National Book Critics Circle Award; A Kiss in Space (1999), and Open Shutters (2003), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Salter has a children’s book to her credit The Moon Comes Home (1989) and a play, Falling Bodies, which was first produced in 2004. In addition, she is a lyricist whose songs from the cycle Rooms of Light, set to music by Fred Hersch, premiered at The Allen Room, Lincoln Center in 2007. Icelandic composer Snorri Sigfus Birgisson premiered his work “The Drift of Melancholy,” a setting of three Salter poems for soprano and chamber orchestra, at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall the same year.
Salter’s essays and reviews appear in The New York Times Book Review and The Yale Review, among other publications. She has received numerous awards, including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Salter is on the board of the Amy Clampitt Fund, The Kenyon Review, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She has lived abroad for extended periods, in Japan, England, Italy, Iceland, and France. After many years of teaching at Mount Holyoke College, she is now Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She and her husband, writer Brad Leithauser, divide their time between Amherst, Massachusetts and Baltimore.
Les Murray calls Salter's poems, “moving and adventurous“ and poet Carolyn Kizer has written of Salter's work, "These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, in intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed."
ABOUT A Phone Call to the Future (Knopf)
One of the major poets of her generation gives us superb new poems along with a selection of the best from her previous award-winning collections. In Mary Jo Salter’s poetry we have a unique blend of domestic drama and the grittier, wider world. In the title poem, she reimagines the technological simplicities and humanistic verities of the past with the brilliantly disorienting detachment. Here are poems imbued with the violence of modern life—from the slapping of a child on the subway to the Iraq war—and others that bring witty luminosity to peacocks in the park, show-shine “thrones” at the airport, and poetry itself. A tender elegy for the poet Anthony Hecht is followed by poems about the baroque sculpture Bernini and the German Expressionist painter August Macke. And although in many of the poems Salter looks back wistfully at what is lost, she also sets her sight on the future: “Lord, surprise me with even more to miss,” she writes in “Wake-up Call.”
Among the older poems are biographical narrative about Thomas Jefferson and another linking Helen Keller and Alexander Graham Bell to the seemingly historical Sherlock Holmes; moving elegies such as “Dead Letters”; light verse such as “Video Blues”; and poems that carry penetrating evocation of foreign settings, often reflecting on the very act of seeing. Here is both powerful reminder and a ringing confirmation of Salter’s remarkable gifts.
“Salter . . . performs with deep pleasure and arresting artistry the paired arts of avid observation and the transformation of hectic experience into crystalline images, golden threads of narrative, and startling extrapolations . . . Salter’s moves are so precise and gravity-defying, so astonishingly eloquent, the exhilarated reader feels as though she’s watching a gymnast perform intricate, risky, and unpredictable sequences, nailing each one perfectly.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
