Poetry Reading and Book Signing
Carroll Community College, Friday, March 6, 2009 at 7pm
Mary Jo Salter
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. Mary Jo Salter’s poetry offers a unique blend of domestic drama with the grittier, wider world. In the title poem, she re-imagines the technological simplicities and humanistic verities of the past with a brilliantly disorienting detachment. Her poems are imbued with the violence of modern life—from the slapping of a child on the subway to the Iraq war—and others that bring a witty luminosity to peacocks in the park, shoe-shine “thrones” at the airport and 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. And, although 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. Student Center. (SqueakyChu)… (more)
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. Mary Jo Salter’s poetry offers a unique blend of domestic drama with the grittier, wider world. In the title poem, she re-imagines the technological simplicities and humanistic verities of the past with a brilliantly disorienting detachment. Her poems are imbued with the violence of modern life—from the slapping of a child on the subway to the Iraq war—and others that bring a witty luminosity to peacocks in the park, shoe-shine “thrones” at the airport and 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. And, although 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. Student Center. (SqueakyChu)… (more)
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