A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems

Celebrated since the 1980s for her deftly articulate, often wittily rhymed lyric poems, Salter demonstrates those strengths and others in this sixth volume. From the start, Salter’s verse can sound urbane and serious, ceremonious and supple: a nine-part elegy for a friend who died young contains a villanelle with the refrain “I know you’re gone for good. And this is how:/ were you alive, you would have called by now.” Other poems react to the death of Salter’s mother, to her own experience of parenthood, and to life with her husband, poet and critic Brad Leithauser. Salter may be the most gifted mid-career disciple of James Merrill’s work, and her detractors may say she still works in his shadow. Yet her loosely syllabic stanzas owe as much to Marianne Moore, and her best poems stand apart for their careful sensitivity both to works of art and to her own family life, sounding as much herself when sighing, “you reach an age when classics// are what you must have read” as when she “imagines the synchronized operations/ across the neighborhood:/ putting the children to bed;/ laying out clean clothes.” (Mar.)