Dimensions: 6.2300(W) x Dimensions: 8.8000(H) x Dimensions: 0.5100(D)
The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prizewinning poet.
In Zoom Rooms, Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives.
The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings—a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family—finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity. Salter shows too how imagination collapses time and space: in “Island Diaries,” the pragmatist Robinson Crusoe meets on the beach a shipwrecked dreamer from an earlier century, Shakespeare’s Prospero. Poems that meditate on objects—a silk blouse, a hot water bottle—address the human need to heal and console. Our paradoxically solitary but communal experiences find expression, too, in poems about art, from a Walker Evans photograph to a gilded Giotto altarpiece.
In these beautiful new poems, Salter directs us to moments we may otherwise miss, reminding us that alertness is itself a form of gratitude. "What I so admire about Salter’s work is that directness never comes at the expense of deep thought, nor does a baseline cheerfulness and willingness to be persuaded by life’s pleasure exist without acknowledgement of senselessness and strife . . . Salter captures how our experiences of beauty aren’t quite articulable and implicitly challenge our understanding of time's passing." —Maya C. Popa, Poetry Society of America ("The Poet's Nightstand")MARY JO SALTER is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of eight previous poetry collections and a children’s book, and is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She lives in Baltimore.Part One
YOUR SESSION HAS TIMED OUT
due to inactivity. Do you want to reboot back to your nativity?
Too bad. You can’t go back. Or forward, for that matter. Remember running track,
dunking a basketball, or, come to think of it, doing anything at all?
Too bad. You can’t reboot. In fact, the very terms you use will soon be moot,
will take their downward spiral like you to a black hole while brave new words go viral—
assuming being “active” or “inactive” is a thing in the future. Or to “live.”
ORECCHIETTE
The trattoria crowd is so loud we keep leaning forward to be heard.
Again: “What did you say?” he asks, cupping an ear. “I’m having the orecchiette,”
I tell him—tripping there the obedient neurons tracking back to Apulia, where
my mother and I, hosted by distant, just-met cousins, were led to a wide bed
sprinkled with flower petals. “In fact it wasn’t flowers”— I’m warming to my tale—
“but pasta, ear-shaped, eggy, handmade orecchiette spread on the beds to dry.
Get it? Ear is orecchio. Like the French for ear, oreille. And like oreiller, pillow.”
Heaps of translated ears sleeping at noon, then wakened to feed me all these years
later—why be beholden (given all I’ve forgotten) to this little scene?
Italianness, for starters— a pride in being related to a place, like a first course—
but things that happened after have been poured on like a sauce and given it a stir.
All the delicious days I’ve eaten, unrecorded, all the poems and plays
on words I was too lazy to set down, and are gone! Nor am I yet ready
to tell even the patient man who shares my pillow why I’ve fallen silent.
“Looks really good,” I shout at his lasagna while thinking I should find out
which cousins are still alive . . . It occurs to me: I am. Do I catch a whiff
of courage off my plate of orecchiette? A little taste of what I should write?
CARLO CRIVELLI AND THE TREES
Playful, prolific, noted for tableaux of bounty, he’d do a portrait of a man’s face composed of fruit, or picture his Madonnas under
garlands, bright as chandeliers, of nearly three-D pickles, pears, apples pecked by birds; then turn even a gruesome Crucifixion
into a sort of game. Here: a trompe-l’oeil in oil and tempera replicates the look of wood on a panel that is truly wooden,
in fact paints over knots to make knots in the hard planes of the cross. Real as a relic, the unique tree on which one man-god dies
while mourners on both sides gaze up, their tresses patterned like wood grain again, the dry eyes in their deep- lined faces weeping beads of sap,
and in that surfacing of sorrow each arrested teardrop tough as an acorn, as if there to sow millennia of grief.
What excuse then for the lustrous finish on the instrument of torture set before that sparse landscape? What could be meant
by the assorted grayish, spindly background saplings, barely a leaf (though it is spring) alive? Should we write off existence simply
as a pale prequel to the tale of afterlife? False question for him, probably, inclined to honor foremost his material,
which is to say the fresh-cut trees splintered into delicate paintbrushes, or hewn as flat massive planks to soak up these
minerals and plants ground down to the consistency of paints that may, or may not, blossom in the ways the maker wants.
