Zoom Rooms: Poems

by Mary Jo Salter

Overview

The timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prizewinning poet.

In Zoom Rooms, Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives.

The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings—a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family—finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity. Salter shows too how imagination collapses time and space: in “Island Diaries,” the pragmatist Robinson Crusoe meets on the beach a shipwrecked dreamer from an earlier century, Shakespeare’s Prospero. Poems that meditate on objects—a silk blouse, a hot water bottle—address the human need to heal and console. Our paradoxically solitary but communal experiences find expression, too, in poems about art, from a Walker Evans photograph to a gilded Giotto altarpiece.

In these beautiful new poems, Salter directs us to moments we may otherwise miss, reminding us that alertness is itself a form of gratitude.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593321317
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/29/2022
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	1,135,955
Product dimensions:	6.23(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

MARY JO SALTER is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of eight previous poetry collections and a children’s book, and is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She lives in Baltimore.

Read an Excerpt

Part One

YOUR SESSION HAS TIMED OUT

due to inactivity.
Do you want to reboot back to your nativity?

Too bad. You can’t go back.
Or forward, for that matter.
Remember running track,

dunking a basketball,
or, come to think of it, doing anything at all?

Too bad. You can’t reboot.
In fact, the very terms you use will soon be moot,

will take their downward spiral like you to a black hole while brave new words go viral—

assuming being “active”
or “inactive” is a thing in the future. Or to “live.”

ORECCHIETTE

The trattoria crowd is so loud we keep leaning forward to be heard.

Again: “What did you say?”
he asks, cupping an ear.
“I’m having the orecchiette,”

I tell him—tripping there the obedient neurons tracking back to Apulia, where

my mother and I, hosted by distant, just-met cousins,
were led to a wide bed

sprinkled with flower petals.
“In fact it wasn’t flowers”—
I’m warming to my tale—

“but pasta, ear-shaped, eggy,
handmade orecchiette spread on the beds to dry.

Get it? Ear is orecchio.
Like the French for ear, oreille.
And like oreiller, pillow.”

Heaps of translated ears sleeping at noon, then wakened to feed me all these years

later—why be beholden
(given all I’ve forgotten)
to this little scene?

Italianness, for starters—
a pride in being related to a place, like a first course—

but things that happened after have been poured on like a sauce and given it a stir.

All the delicious days
I’ve eaten, unrecorded,
all the poems and plays

on words I was too lazy to set down, and are gone!
Nor am I yet ready

to tell even the patient man who shares my pillow why I’ve fallen silent.

“Looks really good,” I shout at his lasagna while thinking I should find out

which cousins are still alive . . .
It occurs to me: I am.
Do I catch a whiff

of courage off my plate of orecchiette? A little taste of what I should write?


CARLO CRIVELLI AND THE TREES

Playful, prolific, noted for tableaux of bounty, he’d do a portrait of a man’s face composed of fruit,
or picture his Madonnas under

garlands, bright as chandeliers,
of nearly three-D pickles, pears,
apples pecked by birds; then turn even a gruesome Crucifixion

into a sort of game. Here: a trompe-l’oeil in oil and tempera replicates the look of wood on a panel that is truly wooden,

in fact paints over knots to make knots in the hard planes of the cross.
Real as a relic, the unique tree on which one man-god dies

while mourners on both sides gaze up,
their tresses patterned like wood grain again, the dry eyes in their deep-
lined faces weeping beads of sap,

and in that surfacing of sorrow each arrested teardrop tough as an acorn, as if there to sow millennia of grief.

What excuse then for the lustrous finish on the instrument of torture set before that sparse landscape? What could be meant

by the assorted grayish, spindly background saplings, barely a leaf
(though it is spring) alive?
Should we write off existence simply

as a pale prequel to the tale of afterlife? False question for him, probably, inclined to honor foremost his material,

which is to say the fresh-cut trees splintered into delicate paintbrushes, or hewn as flat massive planks to soak up these

minerals and plants ground down to the consistency of paints that may, or may not, blossom in the ways the maker wants.

Table of Contents

Part 1

Your Session has Timed Out 3

Orecchiette 4

Carlo Crivelli and the Trees 7

White Petals. 3 A.M. 9

Oak Hill, West Virginia 10

The Fortune Cookie 13

Man-Barbies 15

Silk Blouse 17

St. Sebastian Interceding for the Plague-Stricken 19

Part 2

Zoom Rooms 25

Part 3

Mule Team And Poster 31

Vanitas 33

Scrabble 35

Italian Haiku 36

John Singer Sargent: Two Interiors 38

Marcel Proust: Three Poems 41

Triangle 44

The Golfers 46

Cruise 47

Hat Day 48

Part 4

Island Diaries 53

Part 5

Fruitcake 63

Eggs 65

Jury Duty 68

Last Words 71

The Fire 72

Hot Water Bottle 73

Forgetting Names 75

A Letter to Leena 76

Acknowledgments 81

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/21/2022

The timely and delightful ninth collection from Salter (The Surveyors) addresses the bewildering present moment while reminding of past (and future) pleasures. Salter conjures a rich cast of characters and literary allusions, her fine ear on display at every turn. In one poem, she describes Chopin, “The handsomer for your pallor, still you thrill/ To the flood of sun into your sickroom.” Her interest in the ekphrastic form is apparent, as in the poignant “St. Sebastian Interceding for the Plague-Stricken,” which presents haunting echoes of the present day. However, this interest transcends mere artistic translation from one medium to another, and her poems consistently explore what can only be intimated or suggested: “No, what Giotto’s got to do/ is make God in man’s image and/ render His resplendence as// intolerable,” she writes in “Triangle.” Elsewhere, poems focus on moments that, in the context of the pandemic present, take on a new depth and vision. The title poem, “Zoom Rooms,” captures the alienation, strangeness, and unprecedented circumstances of negotiating this pain: “Shocking you died (of ‘something else’), and even/ stranger you’re more present in our grief:/ more three-dimensional than we are now.” Salter’s direct and unfailingly imaginative works make this collection a thorough pleasure. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"What I so admire about Salter’s work is that directness never comes at the expense of deep thought, nor does a baseline cheerfulness and willingness to be persuaded by life’s pleasure exist without acknowledgement of senselessness and strife . . . Salter captures how our experiences of beauty aren’t quite articulable and implicitly challenge our understanding of time's passing." —Maya C. Popa, Poetry Society of America ("The Poet's Nightstand")

From the Publisher

04/01/2022

It would be challenging to find a poetry collection encompassing a wider range of subjects than Salter's latest (following The Surveyors). From the mundane (eggs; Ken dolls; jury duty; Scrabble) to the refined (paintings by Carlo Crivelli and John Singer Sargent; Walker Evans's photography; a mash-up of Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest), Salter enfolds the varied objects of her attention within the lapidary midcentury formalism of polished rhymes and traditional prosody, albeit tempered by the pathos that accompanies age and anticipates the time when "no tip of any tongue,/ will even think of trying/ to call me up from the vast/ data cache of the past:/ the forgotten name is mine") But Salter's wit often lightens the mood, as in the timely title poem: "Self-surveilled, your eye contact on-screen/ seems off. Don't look at people! Focus where/ the tiny camera is that proves you're there." VERDICT Salter's "fine high language of address and dress" may not appeal to everyone, but those who lament the current dearth of old-school verse will find much to admire here.—Fred Muratori

Library Journal