Open Shutters

Open Shutters (2003)
“[Salter] … challenges us with the discovery that something lucid, forthright, and fantastically undisheveled might also be sublime.”
–Stephen Metcalf, New York Times Book Review

“Salter … performs with deep pleasure and arresting artistry the paired arts of avid observation and the transformation of hectic experience into crystalline images, golden threads of narrative, and startling extrapolations . . Salter’s moves are so precise and gravity-defying, so astonishingly eloquent, the exhilarated reader feels as though she’s watching a gymnast perform intricate, risky, and unpredictable sequences, nailing each one perfectly.
–Donna Seaman, Booklist

“A mature poet at the top of her form… Delightful.”
–Rochelle Ratner, Library Journal

A Kiss in Space (1999)
“The book of poetry I loved best this year was A Kiss in Space, full of moving adventurous work.”
–Les Murray, Times Literary Supplement

“These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, in intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed.”
–Carolyn Kizer

Sunday Skaters (1994)
“A beautiful book, a major phase in the career of an important poet … In these poems a quality of close but apparently effortless observation is backed up by a strong and deep moral sense.”
–Henry Taylor
Unfinished Painting (1989)
“Mary Jo Salter’s work embodies the marriage of superb craftsmanship to the tragic sense of reality, which is the formula of true poetry.”
–Joseph Brodsky
Henry Purcell in Japan (1985)
“A poetry full of alertness, tact, credible feeling, and an unforced gaiety of form … For all her modesty of tone, she has a range of awareness and response, which, in a time when much poetry has shrunk to the merely personal, is refreshingly large.”
–Richard Wilbur

Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit and Baltimore. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and worked as a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly and as poetry editor of The New Republic. A vice president of the Poetry Society of America, she is also a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. In addition to her five poetry collections, she is the author of a children’s book, The Moon Comes Home. She is Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer at Mount Holyoke College and lives with her family in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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