Kiss in Space : Poems

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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.

PART I THE JEWEL OF THE WORLD

Fire-Breathing Dragon

(4)

Wreckage

(2)

A Rainbow over the Seine

(2)

A Leak Somewhere

(3)

Video Blues

(1)

Brief Candle

(5)

Up and Down

Home Movies: A Sort of Ode

(2)

Libretto

(3)

Sound Effects

(3)

Cutlery

(1)

Hail in Honfleur

(2)

The Jewel of the World

(6)

Distance

(4)

PART II ALTERNATING CURRENTS

Alternating Currents

(16)

PART III A KISS IN SPACE

Kangaroo

(2)

The Seven Weepers

(4)

A Christmas Story

(2)

Institute for the Hand

(3)

Mr. X

(1)

Collage

(3)

Absolute September

(1)

Marco Polo

(2)

Au Pair

(2)

A Robin's Nest

(2)

Liam

(1)

A Kiss in Space

(3)

Notes and Acknowledgments

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

A Rainbow over the Seine

        Noiseless at first, a spray
    of mist in the face, a nose-
gay of moisture never
    destined to be a downpour.
        Until the sodden cloud
    banks suddenly empty
into the Seine with a loud
    clap, then a falling ovation
        for the undrenchable
    sun--which goes on shining
our shoes while they're filling
    like open boats and the sails
        of our newspaper hats
    are flagging, and seeing
that nobody thought to bring
    an umbrella, puts
        up a rainbow instead.
    A rainbow over the Seine,
perfectly wrought as a draw-
    bridge dreamed by a child
        in crayon, and by the law
    of dreams the connection
once made can only be lost;
    not being children
        we stand above the grate
    of the Metro we're not
taking, thunder underfoot, and
    soak up what we know:
        the triumph of this arc-
    en-ciel, the dazzle
of this monumental
    prism cut by drizzle, is
that it vanishes.

Excerpted from A Kiss in Space: Poems by Mary Jo Salter
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