A Phone Call to the Future

Book excerpt: New poems from one of the major poets of her generation, along with a selection of the best from previous collections. In Salter's poetry we have a unique blend of domestic drama and the grittier wider world. In the title poem, she reimagines the technological simplicities and humanistic verities of the past with a disorienting detachment. Here are poems imbued with the violence of modern life, and others that bring a witty luminosity to peacocks in the park, to shoe-shine "thrones" at the airport, and to poetry itself. A tender elegy for the poet Anthony Hecht is followed by poems about the Baroque sculptor Bernini and the German Expressionist painter August Macke, which add to Salter's already impressive list of poems about image-making. Although in many of the poems Salter looks back wistfully at what is lost, she also sets her sights on the future: "Lord, surprise me with even more to miss."--From publisher description.