A Kiss in Space: Poems
by Mary Jo Salter
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mary Jo SalterEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-03-30
ISBN: 0375405313
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of A Kiss in Space: Poems
Book Review: A Kiss in Space
Summary: 4 Stars
This fourth collection of poetry from Mary Jo Salter comes like a dragon's breath of hot air--filling a balloon then lifting it and its occupants (we, the readers) to sail far above the expanses of Salter's lucid imagination. Thus our ride begins.We are there, raising our champagne glasses along with Salter, as hundreds of balloons rise over Chartres. We stay at her side--happily--as she touches down on her lifetime and those of historical and fictional figures: Alexander Graham Bell, Helen Keller, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
We head into space for the kiss. We even come upon a gang of kangaroos "like flustered actors who don't know what to do with their hands... who look properly stunned when our typecast tour bus, bumptious as a cousin none of them invited, raises a ruckus of flung stones and dust and scrapes to a halt before them, face to face."
These encounters with nature, history, fiction, family, animals and the elusive self--is each a kiss in space-- and never a mere peck on the cheek.
Summary of A Kiss in Space: Poems
From the first poem, which takes us up in a hot-air balloon over Chartres, to the last, in which a Russian cosmonaut welcomes an American colleague onto the Mir space station, Mary Jo Salter's exhilarating fourth collection draws the reader into the long distances of the imagination and the intimacies of the heart.Poignant poems about her own past--such as "Libretto," in which a childhood initiation into opera merges with a family drama--are set against historical poems such as "The Seven Weepers," where a nineteenth-century English explorer in Australia comes face-to-face with the Aborigines his own people have doomed to decimation.
The book's centerpiece, "Alternating Currents," juxtaposes real historical figures like Alexander
Graham Bell and Helen Keller with their fictional contemporaries Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, as each of them plumbs the mysteries of perception.
Along the way are poems on family life, on films (from home movies to Hollywood romances), on travel in France, and on works of art (from a child's fingerpainted refrigerator magnet to Titian's last painting).
In this splendid and engaging collection, Mary Jo Salter pays homage with wit and compassion to the precious dailiness of life on earth, while gazing tantalizingly beyond its boundaries to view such wondrous events as a kiss in space.
Encapsulated within each of Mary Jo Salter's poems is a story. There are characters (the poet, her children, her parents, friends) and events (a balloon ride outside of Paris, an afternoon spent listening to Puccini, an evening in front of the television). And there is a strong narrative theme--enough to fill a whole novel--in every poem. In "Libretto," for example, Salter describes her first introduction to opera under her mother's tutelage, foreshadowing within the first few lines the melancholy end of this story: "but why are we alone? / Were Daddy and my brothers gone / all day, or has memory with its flair / for simple compositions air- / brushed them from the shot?" Mother and daughter sit on "an ivory silk couch that doesn't fit / the life she's given in Detroit" and listen to the strains of Madame Butterfly while gazing out the window at the neighbors' two-car garages. Ominously, Salter reports, "It's 1962 / and though I'm only eight, I know / that with two cars, people can separate."
Some of Salter's most powerful poems concentrate on the prosaic: "A Leak Somewhere" describes a family watching an old movie about the Titanic on television. But Salter invests even this safe domestic drama with vague unease as the parents, having put the children to bed, are overcome with a sense
that hidden in the house a fineThese poems are deceptively simple: one doesn't have to read them several times to understand their point. Yet the intelligence behind them--the careful choice of images, the way detail upon detail accretes like amber hardening around an insect to form a whole universe in microcosm--makes these very complex works, indeed. A Kiss in Space is eloquent, elegant, and a pleasure to read and reread. --Alix Wilber
crack--nothing spectacular,
only a leak somewhere--is slowly
widening to claim each of us
in random order, and we start to rock
in one another's arms.
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