Superb new poems from one of the major poets of her generation, along with a selection of the best from Mary Jo Salter’s 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 a brilliantly disorienting detachment. Here are poems imbued with the violence of modern life—a mother slapping her child on the subway, a child losing everything in the Iraq war—and others that bring a witty luminosity to peacocks in the park, to shoe-shine “thrones” at the airport, and to poetry itself. A tender elegy for the poet Anthony Hecht is followed by poems about the Baroque sculptor Bernini and the German Expressionist painter August Macke, which add to Salter’s already impressive list of poems about image-making. Although in many of the poems Salter looks back wistfully at what is lost, she also sets her sights on the future: "Lord, surprise me with even more to miss," she writes in “Wake-up Call.” Among the selected older poems are the much-anthologized “Welcome to Hiroshima” and “Boulevard du Montparnasse”; her historical narrative “The Hand of Thomas Jefferson”; and moving elegies for her mother (“Dead Letters”), her friend (“Elegies for Etsuko”), and her psychiatrist (“Another Session”). Here, also, are such light verse delights as “Video Blues” (“My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy”) and “A Morris Dance”; poems that bring a deeper insight into foreign settings and cultures (from “Henry Purcell in Japan” to “Icelandic Almanac” to “The Seven Weepers,” set in the Australian outback of 1845); and poems that reflect on the art of seeing, as in “Young Girl Peeling Apples” and “Trompe l’Oeil.” A Phone Call to the Future is a powerful reminder and a ringing confirmation of Mary Jo Salter’s remarkable gifts.

A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Salter, Mary Jo

Poetry

KNOPF

A Kiss in Space: Poems

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.

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.

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.

Open Shutters

United States

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.

Genre Fiction

A beautiful collection of verse––both light and dark, elegiac and affirmative––from one of our most admired poets. The title Nothing by Design is taken from Salter’s villanelle “Complaint for Absolute Divorce,” in which we’re asked to entertain the thought of a no-fault universe. The wary search for peace, personal and public, is a constant theme in poems as varied as “Our Friends the Enemy,” about the Christmas football match between German and British soldiers in 1914; “The Afterlife,” in which Egyptian tomb figurines labor to serve the dead; and “Voice of America,” where Salter returns to the Saint Petersburg of her exiled friend, the late Joseph Brodsky. A section of charming light verse serves as counterpoint to another series entitled “Bed of Letters,” in which Salter addresses the end of a long marriage. Artfully designed, with a highly intentional music, these poems movingly give form to the often unfathomable, yet very real, presence of nothingness and loss in our lives.

Nothing by Design

Literary

A responsive and media-rich revision of the best-selling anthology of poetry in English This highly anticipated new edition features NEW poets, NEW poems, and innovative digital resources. The Sixth Edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry is an even better teaching tool for instructors and remains an unmatched value for students.

The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Sixth Edition)

Ferguson Ph.D., Margaret

Kendall, Tim

History & Criticism

W.W.Norton&Company

The Norton Anthology of Poetry

Norton Anthology of Poetry

STALLWORTHY, Jon

Ferguson, Margaret

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Offers representative selections from the works of major British and American poets, from modernized medieval texts to contemporary verse.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Salter, Mary Jo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Salter, Mary Jo

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Salter, Mary Jo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems

A Kiss in Space: Poems

A Kiss in Space: Poems

Open Shutters

A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems

Nothing by Design

The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Sixth Edition)

The Norton Anthology of Poetry

Norton Anthology of Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Poetry