This "wholly attractive volume" that brings together twenty-five years of "elegantly shaped and voiced creations" (William Pritchard,The Boston Globe) offers a generous sampling of Mary Jo Salter's five previous award-winning volumes and a collection of superb new poems. A mid-career retrospective of one of the major poets of her generation.

Mary Jo Salter is the author of five previous books of poetry and a children’s book, The Moon Comes Home. She is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She divides her time between Amherst, Massachusetts, and Baltimore.

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WAKE-UP CALL

The water is slappingwake up, wake up, against the boat
chugging away from Venice, infinite essence
of what must end because it is beautiful,

Venice that shrinks to a bobbing, pungent postcard
and then to nothing at all as the automatic
doors at the airport obligingly shut behind you.

Re-enter a world where everything’s much the same,
where you’ve gone slack again, and don’t even know it,
so unaware that you actually shrug to yourself,

I’ll be back, and yes, for some lucky stiffs it’s true,
sometimes it’s you, you’re sure to get more chances
at Venice, and Paris, and that blessed, unmarked place

where you sat on a bench and he kissed you that first time,
so many kisses, you hoped he would never stop,
you can hope, at least, not ever to forget it,

or forget how your babies, latching onto your breast,
would roll up their eyes in an ecstasy that was comic
in its seriousness, though your joy was no less grave,

but you’re not going back to so much, and more and more,
the longer you live there’s more not to go back to,
and what you demand in your gratitude and greed

is more life in which to get so attached to something,
someone or someplace, you’re sure you’ll die right then
when you can’t have it back, something you don’t even know

the name of now, but will be yours before receding
as an indispensable ache; what you’re saying
isLord, surprise me with even more to miss.

SONG OF THE CHILDREN
April 2005

Two years since the spring
of the invasion, a well-conducted
symphony of fireworks on the screen,
I sit at home, half-humming
a tune from miles away inside my brain.
I think I know, at least, the song's refrain—
In the end it's about the children
In the end it's about the children—
What's wrong with me? The music isn't coming.

"What is the grass?" the child asked Whitman,
gathering strangeness in his outstretched palms.
"All flesh is grass," said Brahms
in well-aimed thunder, merciless and grand.
What is the hook
the child is left with, he who lost
two parents, and a sister, and a hand?
Who bears the cost?
How can I tell him—I who can barely look?

A shrug then: fate is fickle;
so many soldiers won't be getting older;
as another year's worth of recruits
hoists its rifles, shoulder to young shoulder,
another pen rests on my ink-stained knuckle.
I have been spared, it seems, for another year
to compose the awkward rags of my regrets—
In the end it's about the children
In the end it's about the children—

Another year has curled
in on itself;
under the wheels of Humvees caked
with dust, the turning, half-cocked world
is skewered on its axis.
My pen is angled too—is glad enough
to bleed into long ranks and files of taxes:
before my country's army rolling forward
I write my check, the white flag of coward.

POETRY SLALOM

Much less
the slam
than the slalom
gives me a thrill:
that solemn, no-fuss
Olympian skill
in skirting flag after flag
of the bloody obvious;
the fractional
lag,
while speeding downhill,
at the key
moment,
in a sort of whole-
body trill:
the note repeated,
but elaborated,
more touching and more
elevated
for seeming the thing
to be evaded.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpted from A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems by Mary Jo Salter
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.