Zoom rooms Poems

Review by Booklist Review

Salter pairs her exceptional formal deftness with arch insouciance, bringing both rigor and wit to subtly provocative poems that revel in human ingenuity and parse fear, loss, and sorrow. Her ninth collection opens with the first of her digital inquiries, "Your Session Has Timed Out," a hilarious, coyly metaphysical take on online error messages: "Too bad. You can't go back. / Or forward, for that matter." "Zoom Rooms" is a wryly illuminating suite of sonnets about life on the screen--meetings, teaching, a memorial service, a visit with a new grandchild--and our perhaps alarming adaptation to disembodiment. Salter, who can feel Audenesque, is a supremely incisive ekphrastic poet, riffing on sources that include an extraordinarily detailed Renaissance painting by Carlo Crivelli, a haunting fifteenth-century plague scene by Josse Lieferinxe, and a Walker Evans photograph, while considering perception and all that we bring to an image, a poem, a life. With a striking mash-up of The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe, bemused reflections on her daughters calling Ken dolls Man-Barbies, and the question of our future as "a techno-human species," these are poems of piquant insight and artistry.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The timely and delightful ninth collection from Salter (The Surveyors) addresses the bewildering present moment while reminding of past (and future) pleasures. Salter conjures a rich cast of characters and literary allusions, her fine ear on display at every turn. In one poem, she describes Chopin, "The handsomer for your pallor, still you thrill/ To the flood of sun into your sickroom." Her interest in the ekphrastic form is apparent, as in the poignant "St. Sebastian Interceding for the Plague-Stricken," which presents haunting echoes of the present day. However, this interest transcends mere artistic translation from one medium to another, and her poems consistently explore what can only be intimated or suggested: "No, what Giotto's got to do/ is make God in man's image and/ render His resplendence as// intolerable," she writes in "Triangle." Elsewhere, poems focus on moments that, in the context of the pandemic present, take on a new depth and vision. The title poem, "Zoom Rooms," captures the alienation, strangeness, and unprecedented circumstances of negotiating this pain: "Shocking you died (of 'something else'), and even/ stranger you're more present in our grief:/ more three-dimensional than we are now." Salter's direct and unfailingly imaginative works make this collection a thorough pleasure. (Mar.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

It would be challenging to find a poetry collection encompassing a wider range of subjects than Salter's latest (following The Surveyors). From the mundane (eggs; Ken dolls; jury duty; Scrabble) to the refined (paintings by Carlo Crivelli and John Singer Sargent; Walker Evans's photography; a mash-up of Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest), Salter enfolds the varied objects of her attention within the lapidary midcentury formalism of polished rhymes and traditional prosody, albeit tempered by the pathos that accompanies age and anticipates the time when "no tip of any tongue,/ will even think of trying/ to call me up from the vast/ data cache of the past:/ the forgotten name is mine") But Salter's wit often lightens the mood, as in the timely title poem: "Self-surveilled, your eye contact on-screen/ seems off. Don't look at people! Focus where/ the tiny camera is that proves you're there." VERDICT Salter's "fine high language of address and dress" may not appeal to everyone, but those who lament the current dearth of old-school verse will find much to admire here.--Fred Muratori

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Part One YOUR SESSION HAS TIMED OUT due to inactivity. Do you want to reboot back to your nativity? Too bad. You can't go back. Or forward, for that matter. Remember running track, dunking a basketball, or, come to think of it, doing anything at all? Too bad. You can't reboot. In fact, the very terms you use will soon be moot, will take their downward spiral like you to a black hole while brave new words go viral-- assuming being "active" or "inactive" is a thing in the future. Or to "live." ORECCHIETTE The trattoria crowd is so loud we keep leaning forward to be heard. Again: "What did you say?" he asks, cupping an ear. "I'm having the orecchiette," I tell him--tripping there the obedient neurons tracking back to Apulia, where my mother and I, hosted by distant, just-met cousins, were led to a wide bed sprinkled with flower petals. "In fact it wasn't flowers"-- I'm warming to my tale-- "but pasta, ear-shaped, eggy, handmade orecchiette spread on the beds to dry. Get it? Ear is orecchio. Like the French for ear, oreille. And like oreiller, pillow." Heaps of translated ears sleeping at noon, then wakened to feed me all these years later--why be beholden (given all I've forgotten) to this little scene? Italianness, for starters-- a pride in being related to a place, like a first course-- but things that happened after have been poured on like a sauce and given it a stir. All the delicious days I've eaten, unrecorded, all the poems and plays on words I was too lazy to set down, and are gone! Nor am I yet ready to tell even the patient man who shares my pillow why I've fallen silent. "Looks really good," I shout at his lasagna while thinking I should find out which cousins are still alive . . . It occurs to me: I am. Do I catch a whiff of courage off my plate of orecchiette? A little taste of what I should write? CARLO CRIVELLI AND THE TREES Playful, prolific, noted for tableaux of bounty, he'd do a portrait of a man's face composed of fruit, or picture his Madonnas under garlands, bright as chandeliers, of nearly three-D pickles, pears, apples pecked by birds; then turn even a gruesome Crucifixion into a sort of game. Here: a trompe-l'oeil in oil and tempera replicates the look of wood on a panel that is truly wooden, in fact paints over knots to make knots in the hard planes of the cross. Real as a relic, the unique tree on which one man-god dies while mourners on both sides gaze up, their tresses patterned like wood grain again, the dry eyes in their deep- lined faces weeping beads of sap, and in that surfacing of sorrow each arrested teardrop tough as an acorn, as if there to sow millennia of grief. What excuse then for the lustrous finish on the instrument of torture set before that sparse landscape? What could be meant by the assorted grayish, spindly background saplings, barely a leaf (though it is spring) alive? Should we write off existence simply as a pale prequel to the tale of afterlife? False question for him, probably, inclined to honor foremost his material, which is to say the fresh-cut trees splintered into delicate paintbrushes, or hewn as flat massive planks to soak up these minerals and plants ground down to the consistency of paints that may, or may not, blossom in the ways the maker wants. Excerpted from Zoom Rooms: 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.

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