Encapsulated within each of Mary Jo Salter's poems is a story. There are characters (the poet, her children, her parents, friends) and events (a balloon ride outside of Paris, an afternoon spent listening to Puccini, an evening in front of the television). And there is a strong narrative theme--enough to fill a whole novel--in every poem. In "Libretto," for example, Salter describes her first introduction to opera under her mother's tutelage, foreshadowing within the first few lines the melancholy end of this story: "but why are we alone? / Were Daddy and my brothers gone / all day, or has memory with its flair / for simple compositions air- / brushed them from the shot?" Mother and daughter sit on "an ivory silk couch that doesn't fit / the life she's given in Detroit" and listen to the strains of Madame Butterfly while gazing out the window at the neighbors' two-car garages. Ominously, Salter reports, "It's 1962 / and though I'm only eight, I know / that with two cars, people can separate."

Some of Salter's most powerful poems concentrate on the prosaic: "A Leak Somewhere" describes a family watching an old movie about the Titanic on television. But Salter invests even this safe domestic drama with vague unease as the parents, having put the children to bed, are overcome with a sense that hidden in the house a fine
crack--nothing spectacular,
only a leak somewhere--is slowly
widening to claim each of us
in random order, and we start to rock
in one another's arms.
These poems are deceptively simple: one doesn't have to read them several times to understand their point. Yet the intelligence behind them--the careful choice of images, the way detail upon detail accretes like amber hardening around an insect to form a whole universe in microcosm--makes these very complex works, indeed. A Kiss in Space is eloquent, elegant, and a pleasure to read and reread. --Alix Wilber


From Publishers Weekly
A casual yet authoritative confidence in formal verse's storytelling capabilities, like that of Rachel Hadas or James Merrill, is evinced by this fourth collection, following Salter's well-received Sunday Skaters. Although the poet's need to mourn "little parts of the selves/ I can't be part of anymore" can seem precious, her believability as "somebody whose idea of/ reality requires a glance, over morning coffee, at violence" will still find, and merit, admirers. Quotidian existence in Paris and New England, a dominant theme, is registered with quiet heaps of internal rhyme: "hail hobbled us as we ran/ across the cobblestones"; "as soon as one leaf's off the tree/ no day following can fall free/ of the drift of melancholy." Memorably smart moments are the belated elegy for Louis MacNeice, "master of the refrain" and the long poem "Alternating Currents" which recalls Cynthia MacDonald's work in its moves from scenes of Helen Keller's childhood education to the duos of Holmes and Watson, and Graham Bell and his assistant Watson, and investigates how different modes of communication shape the messages they transmit. With carefully crafted images, the lead poem, "Fire-Breathing Dragon," intimates the fragility of life and of life-telling, recounting a hot air balloon trip over Chartres: "the tinted,/ interlocking shapes of crops/ became a story in stained glass/ our shadow could fall into." Like Salter's other books, this Kiss is poised, nobleAto use a favored wordAand humane. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The "kiss in space" is between American astronaut Norman Thagard and Russian astronaut Yelena Kondakova, but all of Salter's poems could be kisses in space: gifts blown through the air to her readers. Dainty but tough, Salter's verse ranges from "Fire-Breathing Dragon"--"Impossible, and yet I seem/ to be dropped in the basket like a cut/ flower trembling on its stem"--to "A Rainbow over the Seine" to "Video Blues," a witty diatribe about her husband's passion for Myrna Loy. The cultural references here are certainly rich and astounding, but they're also fun--and not one wit pretentious. What a delight to read a poet who doesn't focus relentlessly on the long-suffering "I." Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
A lecturer at Mount Holyoke, the author of three previous volumes of verse, and a co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Salter continues to write charming and transparent poems, many bearing a bluestocking wit and the sensibility of a smart coed. Precious without being arch, Salters careful measures expertly recall times in France (with just a soupon of advanced conversational French): Fire-Breathing Dragon describes ballooning across the countryside, with visions of Chartres; another poem delights in a rainbow over the Seine; in Brief Candle, visitors light candles in Sacre-Coeur; the speaker enjoys a Titian painting in the Louvre (The Jewel of the World); and she contemplates a couple enjoying a meal while it hails outside the restaurant (Hail in Honfleur). In Australia, she watches a kangaroo nurse (Kangaroo) and imagines the life of explorer Charles Sturt coming upon a circle of weeping natives (The Seven Weepers). Salter finds inspiration in small thingsa robins nest, shoes dangling from a tree, her daughter reading next to her on the bed; and in some weightier events: the title poem celebrates a kiss of greeting between American and Russian astronauts in space. Movies lead to visions of mortality (A Leak Somewhere) and good-humored jealousy in a villanelle about her husbands crush on Myrna Loy (Video Blues). The centerpiece of the book, a fully imagined sequence of poems blending facts about Helen Keller, Conan Doyle, and Alexander Graham Bell, is a clever play of light and invention. Salters formal skills often compensate for her slender vision. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"The book of poetry I loved best this year was A Kiss in Space, full of moving, adventurous work."        --Les Murray, Times Literary Supplement

"Salter is one of the outstanding poets to emerge in the last twenty years . . . Fairly crackling with mind-expanding perceptions, Salter's poems make a savory banquet for the imagination." --Phoebe Pettingell, The New Leader

"It's years since a book of new poems has given me the kind of thrill--of admiration, of wonder, of sheer delight--that these poems do. They are so beautifully made, such an exquisite blend of sound and sense, so sure of their territory." --Alastair Reid

"These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, in intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed."          --Carolyn Kizer

"Poems in which tenderness is inwoven with humor, and where impressive technical ability exists at the service of imaginative sanity."
--William Pritchard, Commonweal


Review
"The book of poetry I loved best this year was A Kiss in Space, full of moving, adventurous work."        --Les Murray, Times Literary Supplement

"Salter is one of the outstanding poets to emerge in the last twenty years . . . Fairly crackling with mind-expanding perceptions, Salter's poems make a savory banquet for the imagination." --Phoebe Pettingell, The New Leader

"It's years since a book of new poems has given me the kind of thrill--of admiration, of wonder, of sheer delight--that these poems do. They are so beautifully made, such an exquisite blend of sound and sense, so sure of their territory." --Alastair Reid

"These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, in intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed."          --Carolyn Kizer

"Poems in which tenderness is inwoven with humor, and where impressive technical ability exists at the service of imaginative sanity."
--William Pritchard, Commonweal


Book Description
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 PUBLISHER

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 fourth collection draws the reader into the long distances of the imagination and the intimacies of the heart. 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). 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 CRITICS

Melanie Rehak - New York Times Book Review

...[Chart] the poet's travels beyond the confines of the physical world...[on] the journey each of us makes away from our past and toward an uncertain future.

Book Magazine

[Salter] again presents her formidable talents in accessible, imaginative verse....[She brings] into focus the miracles of domestic matters and quotidian experiences.

Library Journal

The "kiss in space" is between American astronaut Norman Thagard and Russian astronaut Yelena Kondakova, but all of Salter's poems could be kisses in space: gifts blown through the air to her readers. Dainty but tough, Salter's verse ranges from "Fire-Breathing Dragon"--"Impossible, and yet I seem/ to be dropped in the basket like a cut/ flower trembling on its stem"--to "A Rainbow over the Seine" to "Video Blues," a witty diatribe about her husband's passion for Myrna Loy. The cultural references here are certainly rich and astounding, but they're also fun--and not one wit pretentious. What a delight to read a poet who doesn't focus relentlessly on the long-suffering "I." Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Melanie Rehak - The New York Times Book Review

...[Chart] the poet's travels beyond the confines of the physical world...[on] the journey each of us makes away from our past and toward an uncertain future.

Kirkus Reviews

A lecturer at Mount Holyoke, the author of three previous volumes of verse, and a co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Salter continues to write charming and transparent poems, many bearing a bluestocking wit and the sensibility of a smart coed. Precious without being arch, Salter's careful measures expertly recall times in France (with just a soupçon of advanced conversational French): "Fire-Breathing Dragon" describes ballooning across the countryside, with visions of Chartres; another poem delights in a rainbow over the Seine; in "Brief Candle," visitors light candles in Sacre-Coeur; the speaker enjoys a Titian painting in the Louvre ("The Jewel of the World"); and she contemplates a couple enjoying a meal while it hails outside the restaurant ("Hail in Honfleur"). In Australia, she watches a kangaroo nurse ("Kangaroo") and imagines the life of explorer Charles Sturt coming upon a circle of weeping natives ("The Seven Weepers"). Salter finds inspiration in small things—a robin's nest, shoes dangling from a tree, her daughter reading next to her on the bed; and in some weightier events: the title poem celebrates a kiss of greeting between American and Russian astronauts in space. Movies lead to visions of mortality ("A Leak Somewhere") and good-humored jealousy in a villanelle about her husband's crush on Myrna Loy ("Video Blues"). The centerpiece of the book, a fully imagined sequence of poems blending facts about Helen Keller, Conan Doyle, and Alexander Graham Bell, is a clever play of light and invention. Salter's formal skills often compensate for her slender vision.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING