Poet of Reason

Each of these poems dramatizes an individual's character. The street
artist celebrates a great work of art, not in terms of himself but of the ideal found in the original, while the woman on the subway dramatizes a quite different character, as does Gianlorenzo Bernini. What the reader gathers from these examples, as from the example of the therapist in "Another Session," is a sense of human limitation. Awake to one issue, we can be sound asleep to others. Perhaps closest to Salter herself is the street artist who sees the prospect of rain but does not stop.

Much of Salter's poetry yokes lyricism and wit in a way that dramatizes longing and reserve. "Trompe l'Oeil" opens this way:

All over Genoa

you see them: windows with open shutters.

Then the illusion shatters.

But that's not true. You knew

the shutters were merely painted on.

You knew it time and again.

The claim of the painted shutter

that it ever shuts the eye

of the window is an open lie.

The description here turns into wry commentary on convention and expectation. Meanwhile, "Absolute September," from A Kiss in Space (1999), captures the subtle emotions that accompany another kind of expectation, the end of summer. Much of the poem's power derives from its understated tone. Here Salter reveals the touch of her teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, especially Bishop's "One Art." That poem opens, "The art of losing isn't hard to master," and Bishop's rhyming word is "disaster." Salter's repetition of "hard" and the fact that she opens with the same rhyme, "September," "harbinger," "harder," frames matters in an echo of Bishop, before the poem sets off with its own contribution to the subject of loss.

How hard it is to take September

straight--not as a harbinger

of something harder.

Merely like suds in the air, cool scent

scrubbed clean of meaning--or innocent

of the cold thing coldly meant.

How hard the heart tugs at the end

of summer, and longs to haul it in

when it flies out of hand

at the prompting of the first mild breeze.

It leaves us by degrees

only, but for one who sees

summer as an absolute,

Pure State of Light and Heat, the height

to which one cannot raise a doubt,

as soon as one leaf's off the tree

no day following can fall free

of the drift of melancholy.

Delivered with the wit of summer leaving by "degrees" is Salter's quietly reasoned observation about coping with mortality. We feel our existence to be "absolute," just as we know for us time is opposite to that. The rhyming of monosyllabic "tree" and "free" with the polysyllabic "melancholy" is typical of Salter's lightening the auditory effect just as her argument becomes most pointed. There is a tactfulness here to be praised. It dramatizes the poem's argument without distracting from its subject.

"Executive Shoeshine" and "Musical Chair" are two meditations among the new poems that focus on how we react to limitation. Both poems end by gathering description into figure. The executive in the airport, grounded by weather, is getting his shoes shined while he waits. Outside, the wings of the planes are being de-iced.

Salter asks, "Could" the businessman "strike us a deal with the weather?" Then she returns to the shoeshine, with more wordplay (she enjoys puns): "The man hunched below him polishes / one wingtip, then the other." Puns appeal to Salter because they match objects in the world even as they dramatize the limits of the world's rational order. They are a kind of shrug that fuses the competing responses we often have to experience: a feeling of conclusiveness amidst contingency.

"Musical Chair" also deals with our response to limitation. The little boy taking part in a game of musical chairs perceives his best chance is not to wander far, finally not to get up at all. Three-year-old Pete, "who any actuary would pronounce / likely to have the longest time to live / of any of us," endearingly, comically, and a little sadly turns "the most conservative":