{"id":362,"date":"2017-11-24T19:51:43","date_gmt":"2017-11-24T19:51:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/?p=362"},"modified":"2024-03-15T04:31:51","modified_gmt":"2024-03-15T04:31:51","slug":"open-and-shut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/?p=362","title":{"rendered":"Open and Shut"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mary Jo Salter: Open Shutters<\/h2>\n\n\n

A few years back, I moved to a new house. All of my books were packed up in boxes\u2014where they remain even now, stacked up in the garage, waiting for me to find or build some shelf space for them. I miss having them in the house. I miss walking past them and randomly scanning the spines to find one I haven\u2019t looked at in while. It was a bit like being in a used-book store with the sort of poetry section that you\u2019d never find in real life but always fantasized about. I miss book stores, too\u2014used and new. They still exist here and there, like stubborn tree stumps on the parkway waiting for the city to come and grind them down\u2014something that could happen any day or maybe never.<\/p>\n

Of course, the problem of being a compulsive buyer of poetry books means that when I do find myself in a book store with a book in hand, I often can\u2019t remember whether I already own it.<\/p>\n

One book that I purchased twice, unwittingly but without regret, is Open Shutters,<\/em><\/a> by Mary Jo Salter. Her last name does not start with a silent \u201cP,\u201d but that would be appropriate. Salter is a formalist and traditionalist, and her poems evince a distinct musicality and classical sensibility. Not surprisingly, she was a devotee of James Merrill, and one of the more whimsical poems in this collection, \u201cTanker,\u201d stems from a sudden insight into a Merrill pun. In a sense, she finally got the joke, long after the joker had died. The joke, here, is the play between \u201ctanker\u201d and \u201ctanka,\u201d a poetic form related to the haiku (a form that appears in actuality or in essence several times in this book).<\/p>\n

Salter loves a nice wry pun, too, and a dose of dry wit. In \u201cTromp L\u2019Oeil,\u201d for example, a painting on a wall shows \u201cshirttails flapping on a frieze.\u201d You hear an echo of \u201cflapping in the breeze,\u201d so the phrase is at once familiar and foreign. On a grander scale, that\u2019s one of the hallmarks of great poetry: it makes us \u201cre-see\u201d things that we\u2019ve always taken for granted. And of course, who could not fall in love with the title of the book, which truly provides a window (with balcony) into the poems that follow.<\/p>\n

\"Open<\/a>\"\"Salter is a deft formalist, and this book contains an assortment of villanelles, quatrains, sonnets, blank verse, haiku, and various invented rhyme schemes\u2014even a ghazal (which, even in Salter\u2019s accomplished hands, does nothing to endear me to the form). One of my favorites, \u201cAnother Session,\u201d is a long sonnet sequence composed upon hearing about the death of her former therapist, which paints an intimate portrait both of the writer and the therapist (at least, as much as the writer could discern through the professional distance). Other favorites deal with more familiar, familial issues. The poems about Salter\u2019s daughters are particularly poignant. In \u201cSnowed-On Snowman,\u201d when her daughter suggests making a snowman, Salter considers it \u201cher last such invitation,\/ maybe: she\u2019s thirteen.\u201d How often have I made that same calculation! She goes on to describe the photo she took of her daughter with the snowman: \u201ca snapshot side by side\u2014\/ each soon to disappear,\/ him shrinking as she grows.\u201d In a similar vein, \u201cFor Emily at Fifteen\u201d describes a poem that arrives in a letter from her daughter. The central figure (both the poem and meta-poem) is a mermaid, a ready-made metaphor for straddling (well, maybe that\u2019s not the right word) two worlds. Her daughter embodies the \u201cHalf-human and half-fish\/ of adolescence.\u201d The metaphor extends to the chimerical juxtaposition of the serious near-adult who writes a poem with deep connotations and the ordinary child who writes a letter that is mostly superficial.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, that child, Emily Leithauser, is now a poet of some renown in her own right. And as is evident from the name, Salter was married to Brad Leithauser, another of my favorite poets. I cannot think of many such legacies\u2014Franz Wright and Frieda Hughes are the only ones that come immediately to mind.<\/p>\n

Salter\u2019s strength, I believe, is in the half-rhyme: for example, \u201cshutters\u201d and \u201cshatters\u201d in \u201cTromp L\u2019Oeil,\u201d or \u201cshutter\u201d and \u201cscripture\u201d (in another poem about her daughter, \u201cAdvent\u201d). The half-rhyme is, for poetry, what the blue note is for jazz\u2014unique, and hard to replicate or predict, a fall from perfection into an in-between state that defines its own perfection.<\/p>\n

Open Shutters<\/i>, too, defines and achieves its own perfection.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary Jo Salter: Open Shutters A few years back, I moved to a new house. All of my books were packed up in boxes\u2014where they remain even now, stacked up in the garage, waiting for me to find or build … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=362"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":923,"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions\/923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabrielspera.com\/the-first-circle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}