An extraordinary poet examines ordinary subjects

Mary Jo Salter's latest work represents 23 years of poems. (MICHAEL MALYSZKO)

A Phone Call to the Future:
New and Selected Poems
By Mary Jo Salter
Knopf, 222 pp., $26.95

"A Phone Call to the Future," a wholly attractive volume, consists of poems from Mary Jo Salter's five books of verse (her first one published in 1985) along with 18 new poems. Taken together, they represent 23 years' worth of elegantly shaped and voiced creations, all of which emanate from a writer committed to making humorous sense of life. Their subjects are ordinary ones as explored by a young, then not so young married woman: her parents, herself as wife and mother of two daughters, as an American, as a citizen of the world. She writes always as if John Updike's project for his own career - "to transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery" - were her own as well. It is a project less often carried out by contemporary poets than one might expect.

From her first book, "Henry Purcell in Japan," the spirit of place has been strongly evident, whether it's Japan or Iceland or Rome or Paris or Cambridge, Mass. ("Inside the Midget" is a lovely tribute to a once-popular, now-vanished Cambridge eatery.) To celebrate places you have to remember them, and Salter's poems are replete with affectionate recall, as in the title poem to the new volume, where she revisits the 1950s and their furnishings. These, in their strangeness, make her exclaim, "Who says science fiction / is only set in the future?" There is, for example, "the console television with three channels. / Black-and-white picture. Manual controls: / the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven. / You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things. / You have to leave the house to mail a letter." But the three-part poem ends on a note both strong and understated: "All of it was so quaint. And I was there. / Poetry was there; we tried to write it."

This title poem is composed of unrhymed strophes with irregular line lengths, a form appropriate to the improvising voice as it examines itself and its past. But Salter is also at home in rhymed stanzas, in blank verse, or in the sequence of 10 sonnets that make up "Another Session," memories of time spent in therapy and its aftermath. Both witty and poignant, it is remarkable, as are so many of the poems, for the blend of voice tones that add up to a believable, sympathetic human being. Nothing could be further from the engaging atmosphere of a Salter poem than the icy, toneless declaratives favored by some of her contemporaries. Her voice ranges (in "Au Pair") from the mischievous entry into the mind of a young French employee bewildered by American ways but indomitable in her pursuits, to an affecting memory of the recently dead poet Anthony Hecht ("Lunar Eclipse"), in which the dark of the moon coincides with Salter's memory of him: "Dark poet, you were called. / Your last poems were in keeping / with that judgment; gave a world / where 'no joy goes unwept.' / Yet the act of making / was light and lightness still."

The epitaph has its application to Salter's own work "Dead Letters," about her mother's passing, which begins with the daughter receiving, with rueful disbelief, a letter to the mother: "Dear Mrs. Salter: Congratulations! You / (no need to read on - yet I always do) / may have won the sweepstakes, if you'll send . . . / Is this how it must end? / Or will it ever end?" Finally the daughter thinks about, in a nicely ambiguous formulation, "life's artful correspondences" and vows to keep up communications with the dead: "granted time to tend / a growing tenderness, I send / more letters, Mother - these despite / the answers you can't write."

Salter has had good poetic teachers - Dickinson, Frost, Bishop, and Hecht, among others - but is very much her own spirit. It is an appetive spirit that in "Wake-up Call," the lead-off poem in the volume, reminds itself of time passing: "the longer you live there's more not to go back to, / and what you demand in your gratitude and greed / is more life." In "A Phone Call to the Future," this demand for more life is handsomely met.

William H. Pritchard is professor of English at Amherst College. His most recent book is "Updike: America's Man of Letters."