The Surveyors: Poems

by Mary Jo Salter

A beautiful new collection from Mary Jo Salter brings us poems of puzzlement and acceptance in the face of life's surprises.

"I'm still alive and now I'm in Bratislava," says the speaker of one of Salter's poems, as she travels with her unlikely late-in-life love, a military man. She never expected to be here, to know someone like him, to be parted from her previous life; how did it happen? Time is hurtling, but these poems try to slow it down to examine its curious by-products--the prints of Dürer, an Afghan carpet, photographs of people we've lost. The title poem, a crown of sonnets, takes up key moments in the poet's past, the quirky advent of poetic inspiration, and the seemingly sci-fi future of the universe. Throughout, in a tone of ironic wonderment, placing rich new love poems alongside some inevitable poems of leavetaking, Salter invites the reader to weigh and ponder the way things have turned out--for herself, for all of us--in this new century, and perhaps to conclude, as she does, "That's funny . . . "

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

Published August 22, 2017

About the author

Mary Jo Salter is an American poet, a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University.

Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was raised in Detroit and Baltimore, Maryland. She received her B.A. from Harvard University in 1976 and her M.A. from Cambridge University in 1978. In 1976, she participated in the Glascock Prize contest. While at Harvard, she studied with the noted poet Elizabeth Bishop.

From 1984 to 2007, she taught at Mount Holyoke College and was, from 1995 to 2007, a vice-president of the Poetry Society of America.

Salter has been an editor at the Atlantic Monthly and at The New Republic, and she is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College

Reviews

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, but not much stood out to me.

Favorites:
"Dragnet" - a couplet-based poem
"Paparazzi" - a humorous, rhyming piece

Elon Musk
averred we might be living in a vast
computer simulation of a past
world re-created by our own descendants
- "The Surveyors"

My children jumping too high on the bed,
landing on college campuses.
- "The Surveyors"

[John Rullo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Frost-ian endeavor humanizing the grand abstractions of poetry, love, and womanhood down to accessible language for the rest of us. I'm grateful for having had the opportunity to meet with Ms. Salter personally and discuss her work. She is just as grounded and insightful as her poems would suggest.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

well crafted

[Madi Vordenbaum · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poetry from Mary Jo Slater