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Mary Jo Salter grew up in
Detroit and Baltimore, and was educated at Harvard and at Cambridge
University. She is the author of three previous collections of poems,
Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Unfinished Painting (1989,
the Lamont Selection for the year's most distinguished second volume of
poetry), and Sunday Skaters (1994), as well as a children's book,
The Moon Comes Home (1989). She is also an editor of The Norton
Anthology of Poetry.
Her many awards include a recent year in
France on an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. An Emily
Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, she lives
in South Hadley, Massachusetts, with her husband, the writer Brad
Leithauser, and their daughters, Emily and Hilary.
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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.
Praise for A KISS IN SPACE
"These are poems of breath-taking elegance: in formal control, in
intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed. I salute Mary Jo
Salter's accomplishments, and send her, in return, a kiss in
space."
--Carolyn Kizer
"Among the many satisfactions offered by Mary Jo Salter's poems are
their adroit and exact metrics, their lucid and generous vision, their
exhilarating combination of happiness and intelligence, and the sense
they convey of the continuities between domestic detail and universal
meaning."
--Edward Mendelson
In the Poet's Own Words
It's a little joke on myself, I suppose--given that I usually hate to
fly--that the first and last poems of A Kiss in Space take place
above the earth. In the first poem, "Fire-Breathing Dragon," a hot-air
balloon ride with friends provides a literal high, a euphoric sense
(soon dispelled) that I can see not only far into the distance but deep
into the past. In the book's final poem, "A Kiss in Space," where an
American and a Russian astronaut encounter each other on the Mir space
station, I hope to nudge myself and the reader a few inches into the
twenty-first century--with a disorientation that is something like doing
without gravity.
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