Sunday Skaters: Poems

by Mary Jo Salter

A third collection of poems highlights tones of playfulness, wisdom, compassion, and profundity while following a woman's deeply personal journeys through love, family, place, and time. Reprint.

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 1994

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

[John Tessitore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Salter's poetry because it is unafraid of convention--of rhyme and meter, of narrative, of an apt metaphor, of a moral to the story. Paradoxically, given its obvious poetic gestures, I find it courageous, even audacious. Yet I struggled a bit with this volume, in part because it contains so many poems and, therefore, sometimes too much of a good thing. A rough edge sometimes sharpens the mind. An ugly thing sometimes cleanses the palate. You won't find any of that here. But you will find heart, and joy, and old-fashioned skill, and those are rare virtues in contemporary literature.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 S177s 1994