Zoom Rooms
Poems
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- US$15.99
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The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prizewinning poet.
In Zoom Rooms, Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives.
The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings—a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family—finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity. Salter shows too how imagination collapses time and space: in “Island Diaries,” the pragmatist Robinson Crusoe meets on the beach a shipwrecked dreamer from an earlier century, Shakespeare’s Prospero. Poems that meditate on objects—a silk blouse, a hot water bottle—address the human need to heal and console. Our paradoxically solitary but communal experiences find expression, too, in poems about art, from a Walker Evans photograph to a gilded Giotto altarpiece.
In these beautiful new poems, Salter directs us to moments we may otherwise miss, reminding us that alertness is itself a form of gratitude.
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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.
