Poet of Reason
PRUNTY, WYATT
Poet of Reason Mary Jo Salter rewards her readers with clarity and wit. BY WYATT PRUNTY Mary Jo Salter’s A Phone Call to the Future gathers work from fi ve previous collections and adds 18...
...Many of the poems in Salter’s earlier collections deal with art, parents, children, her husband, the poet Brad Leithauser, plus various friends and acquaintances...
...Come on, Pete, let’s dance—” But he won’t budge...
...She is reading about the Mona Lisa...
...Meanwhile, “Absolute September,” from A Kiss in Space (1999), captures the subtle emotions that accompany another kind of expectation, the end of summer...
...Threeyearold Pete, “who any actuary would pronounce / likely to have the longest time to live / of any of us,” endearingly, comically, and a little sadly turns “the most conservative”: His mother nudges, tells him to be polite to the other children...
...Then the illusion shatters...
...You shook my hand...
...It turns out the therapist was a member of the congregation...
...Both poems end by gathering description into fi gure...
...Help was sought...
...Pete could give it a few more years, but who will not understand the way he feels...
...Puns appeal to Salter because they match objects in the world even as they dramatize the limits of the world’s rational order...
...the cry, however expressive, is not...
...Salter’s poems are intended for others, and she carefully avoids obscuring communication with emotion...
...Another Session,” from Open Shutters (2003), comprises 10 sections, 10 sonnets...
...The call, we should remember, is opposite to the cry...
...It leaves us by degrees only, but for one who sees summer as an absolute, Pure State of Light and Heat, the height to which one cannot raise a doubt, as soon as one leaf’s off the tree no day following can fall free of the drift of melancholy...
...The boy is playing a small “video game of some sort...
...And the poem itself ends with that line, but for the speaker, news of the therapist’s death extends matters...
...Much of Salter’s poetry yokes lyricism and wit in a way that dramatizes longing and reserve...
...On another level, however, it proves that much more than just one side is in play...
...But that action is not as violent as Gianlorenzo Bernini’s, who sends a servant to cut and scar permanently the face of his mistress, Costanza Bonarelli, because she has taken another lover...
...Costanza Bonarelli” is an account of the 17th-century sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini’s art and romantic jealousy...
...There is a tactfulness here to be praised...
...The calls placed by her poems, therefore, are not just to the future but to the past and to a large circle of friends and family members...
...but another trait is more important...
...Wit, humor, melody, narrative, and argument are just some of the means by which Salter’s poems reward their readers...
...the sessions ended...
...The poem ends with a troubling comparison between the boy’s smile and that of the Mona Lisa: Raising her arm, but not her gaze, she whacked him hard on the mouth...
...Here there is ample evidence of formal control, but most powerful is the thoughtfulness by which the speaker recounts her story...
...Among Salter’s new poems, “Lunar Eclipse” is written in memory of Anthony Hecht...
...We feel our existence to be “absolute,” just as we know for us time is opposite to that...
...They are a kind of shrug that fuses the competing responses we often have to experience: a feeling of conclusiveness amidst contingency...
...The street artist celebrates a great work of art, not in terms of himself but of the ideal found in the original, while the woman on the subway dramatizes a quite different character, as does Gianlorenzo Bernini...
...Mary Jo Salter’s humor complements her reason...
...That poem opens, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” and Bishop’s rhyming word is “disaster...
...The executive in the airport, grounded by weather, is getting his shoes shined while he waits...
...The last meeting with him concluded this way: “I thanked you for everything...
...Salter asks, “Could” the businessman “strike us a deal with the weather...
...The poem reveals a one-sidedness to such encounters...
...Although Salter is frequently included among the New Formalists, a distinction must be made here as well...
...Much of the poem’s power derives from its understated tone...
...Awake to one issue, we can be sound asleep to others...
...Trompe l’Oeil” opens this way: All over Genoa you see them: windows with open shutters...
...Salter realizes not just the vulnerability of someone in authority, but also raises the question of proper exchange...
...At another point on Salter’s spectrum is the street artist in “The Rebirth of Venus,” who reproduces Botticelli’s Venus with chalk on a sidewalk even though he knows that rain is coming and all will be washed away...
...Nothing bad, only the understated, gently ironical reserve of clinical practice...
...Then she returns to the shoeshine, with more wordplay (she enjoys puns): “The man hunched below him polishes / one wingtip, then the other...
...She has been anthologized with these writers, and certainly she is adept with a variety of forms...
...The woman, balancing fresh roses between her feet, is immersed in an art book...
...What were the terms here...
...Roses and Mona Lisa” disturbingly recounts a woman and small boy on the subway in New York, taking the train to Brooklyn...
...How hard it is to take September straight—not as a harbinger of something harder...
...This contrasts with that other art lover, the woman on the subway who reads a book called Mona Lisa and strikes the child who interrupts her...
...His feet pinned to the ground, he looks down from the hill to where he swam today, in a pond now deepening to a shade that looks like bedtime, that looks like the dark place you hide in under the covers, when afternoon— such a happy, happy one—is gone, and he will not be unseated...
...In time a mysterious smile had crept over him, almost as if he’d grown to expect it...
...But that’s not true...
...BY WYATT PRUNTY Mary Jo Salter’s A Phone Call to the Future gathers work from fi ve previous collections and adds 18 new poems...
...The pathos in all this rests between the healing work of the therapist and the impersonalism that accompanies such a process...
...The little boy taking part in a game of musical chairs perceives his best chance is not to wander far, fi nally not to get up at all...
...The formal property most distinctive in Salter’s poetry is reason, and her emphasis on this coincides with her use of the plain style...
...Here Salter reveals the touch of her teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, especially Bishop’s “One Art...
...Wyatt Prunty, Carlton professor of English at the University of the South (Sewanee), is the author, most recently, of Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems...
...Outside, the wings of the planes are being de-iced...
...It dramatizes the poem’s argument without distracting from its subject...
...When he disturbs the woman she hits him across the mouth...
...Each of these poems dramatizes an individual’s character...
...The poem gives its account...
...The call is made to others...
...This is a call worth taking...
...The rhyming of monosyllabic “tree” and “free” with the polysyllabic “melancholy” is typical of Salter’s lightening the auditory effect just as her argument becomes most pointed...
...In contrast, Salter’s poems are characterized by their conversational tone and meticulous description, and governing these is argument...
...With Salter, the subject of exchange appears in many guises...
...Professional discretion and distance were maintained...
...How hard the heart tugs at the end of summer, and longs to haul it in when it fl ies out of hand at the prompting of the fi rst mild breeze...
...Perhaps closest to Salter herself is the street artist who sees the prospect of rain but does not stop...
...The therapist is thanked for “everything,” but that could range in meaning from zero to—well, everything...
...She has received help from a therapist, but over time the therapist was the one who faced the greatest diffi culty...
...Musical Chair” also deals with our response to limitation...
...The quiet skepticism of her vision is balanced by an imagination that lives in others, frequently in the endearing foibles of others...
...The description here turns into wry commentary on convention and expectation...
...help was received...
...What the reader gathers from these examples, as from the example of the therapist in “Another Session,” is a sense of human limitation...
...The claim of the painted shutter that it ever shuts the eye of the window is an open lie...
...A Phone Call to the Future is an impressive example of how much meaning there is for both parties in a call...
...The relationship ended with a handshake, but if anything, that seems even more conventional than thanking someone...
...and “Geraniums Before Blue Mountain” is a meditation on the German Expressionist August Macke...
...Delivered with the wit of summer leaving by “degrees” is Salter’s quietly reasoned observation about coping with mortality...
...Merely like suds in the air, cool scent scrubbed clean of meaning—or innocent of the cold thing coldly meant...
...Executive Shoeshine” and “Musical Chair” are two meditations among the new poems that focus on how we react to limitation...
...You knew it time and again...
...Title notwithstanding, this book is as much about the past as it is the future...
...Salter’s repetition of “hard” and the fact that she opens with the same rhyme, “September,” “harbinger,” “harder,” frames matters in an echo of Bishop, before the poem sets off with its own contribution to the subject of loss...
...You knew the shutters were merely painted on...
...Much later, one Christmas Eve, the speaker learns the therapist has died, when she discovers his name while reading the program’s “Flowers in Memory of ” during what is perhaps her one trip to church over the course of the year...
...A Phone Call to the Future is to be distinguished from the self-elaborated cries made by some of Salter’s contemporaries...
Vol. 14 • September 2008 • No. 1
