Customer Reviews

A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems

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There are few poets like I look forward to new poems by with as much anticipation as those by MJS. This collection will not disappoint--unless, like me, your reaction is going to be skip the selected work; I want to enjoy the crafted pieces by a master poet. While there are only a handful of new poems, I did do what I always promise myself but rarely follow up on: I revisited a few favorites and forgotten pieces from her earlier volumes. Some readers may lament that the poems are selected and not collected, for me it was a fine blend of new and old material. If MJS's work is new to you, you'll have the joy of discovering material from her previous collections; if you've been following her work all along, you'll be happy to read the grouping that starts the collection. Everything MJS publishes is poetry of the highest order.

Mary Jo Salter, A Phone Call to the Future (Knopf, 2008)

So many new-and-collected books of poetry are ways to track the change in quality of an author's work over a long period of time. The early work shows shakiness and amateurism, fading into seasoned, professional work. Or, more commonly, the fresh, new voice of the early work fades into cynicism, pedantry, or repetition. Not so Mary Jo Salter; there's almost twenty-five years of material in this book, and the stuff from the earliest represented book is just as strong and assured as the new poems. Unfortunately, I had to send it back to the library before I could pull a good quote out of it, but really, I'd have had a difficult time doing so; much of this book wants to be quoted, and as it's one of the longest single-author collections I've read in the past five years (222 pp.), that would make this review a bit longer than I like to go. (Insert emoticon here.) Stop by your local library or bookstore, open to a random page, and sample for yourself. Yes, the rest of the book is really that good, and yes, you want to read it at your earliest convenience. ****