Hello? It's Elementary, My Dear

Mary Jo Salter's poems at first seem to be simple description. She paints objects for us: the French countryside, a child's handmade magnet, a rainbow, a movie. Pretty collections of words, aesthetically pleasing. You seem to just slip over them, letting the images slide in and out of the brain, remaining only that, images.

Yet as you read, the poems become richer and richer. Associations are drawn behind the images, and stories begin to emerge. Sometimes there is only a hint of that story. One poem is about the old movie "Titanic," most of it describing a family watching the movie, laughing at the film's melodrama. Then the poem ends with the narrator sensing a leak in the house, a crack that "is slowly widening to claim each of us in random order, and we start to rock in one another's arms."

The true heart of the poems is found in these comments. It is not actually the objects that Salter is writing about but rather perceptions of those objects. The reader is drawn in by these perceptions. Seeing through Salter's eyes, we begin to understand her connections, how her mind works. In "Libretto" images of a record player and a silk couch lead to the past, so we see what these images mean to the narrator.

The book is divided into three parts: A Jewel in the World, Alternating Currents and A Kiss in Space. The book crescendoes to its center, the poems becoming more and more complex and more demanding. The center part, Alternating Currents, is actually a single longer poem. In it we see Helen Keller and her teacher, Sherlock Homes and Dr. Watson, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Watson. Among these pairs run parallels, threads that wind through all three stories.

It is connections like these that make Salter's poems so refreshing and interesting. You might see the Watson connection immediately, but Salter also weaves in Niagara falls, the color crimson and Braille. In this and the poem before, "A Jewel of the World," these connections are dense and more intellectually challenging than any others, forcing us to see far beyond the surfaces of things.

Salter's language is simple and well-chosen, allowing these ideas to come through clearly. The rhyme is usually nicely understated; once or twice it becomes too contrived and in combination with the outwardly simple subject matter makes the poetry a little too cute and obvious.

Yet more often, Salter's poems have a certain freshness, using everyday occurences as gateways to show the reader paths of ideas he never would guessed at. At one point, she hears children playing the game Marco Polo and speaks of the sounds as "heightened with the importance of the half-understood." Salter's poems make us feel that everything around us is only half-understood, that everything has depths. She does not explore all these depths, but simply shows a bit of what she sees behind these objects, what they make her think of. In this way, she heightens the intensity and importance of everything around us.

The book ends with the title poem, "A Kiss in Space." We can see how this piece grew from a newspaper clipping about two cosmonauts, one gently kissing the other's cheek in zero gravity. As they return from space, we return from the book, with a felt promise that everything around us has meaning, connections, links. And this new perception leads us back to a new reality, back to "whatever Earth has become."