"A superb elegist...An anti-modernist in presentation, she has nonetheless been resolutely modern in subject matter, writing about sonograms, satellite hookups, astronauts kissing in space...How can a poetry of total formal composure contain Chernobyl, Hiroshima and now 9/11 without seeming maudlin or small?   Open Shutters extends the question further, challenging us with the discovery that something lucid, forthright and fantastically disheveled might also be sublime."

    --Stephen Metcalf, The New York Times Book Review, August 3, 2003

"Salter...performs with deep pleasure and arresting artistry the paired arts of avid observation and the transformation of hectic experience into crystalline images, golden threads of narrative,   and startling extrapolations...Salter's moves are so precise and gravity-defying, so astonishingly eloquent, the exhilarated reader feels as though she's watching a gymnast perform intricate, risky, and unpredictable sequences, nailing each one perfectly."

     --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"A mature poet at the top of her form....Delightful."

     --Rochelle Ratner, Library Journal

"...Certainly her best book, with a mature seriousness resulting from its obsession with change and mortality...(A) strong narrative impulse, clarity of diction and image, the ability to give elegant forms a colloquial voice, and an eye for transforming daily detail into luminous symbol almost without our noticing... The book implicitly asks how we can understand our beautiful, awful, richly deceptive world, and whether poetry can aid us in our impossible quest."

    --Jay Rogoff, The Southern Review , Autumn 2003

..."Salter is a poet of chronology, of the effects of psychology and time....For Salter, as for many poets of this particular gift (Dante is the greatest example), time is programmed to loop and double back...The metaphysical mind is never far from the visual mind, which is why we say that a sacred object is "iconic," and a mystical experience is "visionary," both descriptions that suit Salter's well crafted and intensely felt poetry."

       --Richard Ryan, www.rattapallax.com

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A Kiss in Space (1999)

"The book of poetry I loved best this year was A Kiss in Space , full of moving, adventurous work."

-Les Murray, Times Literary Supplement

"These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed."

-Carolyn Kizer

Sunday Skaters (1994)

"A beautiful book, a major phase in the career of an important poet . . . In these poems a quality of close but apparently effortless observation is backed up by a strong and deep moral sense."

-Henry Taylor

"A winning book." -

Washington Post Book World

Unfinished Painting (1989)

"Mary Jo Salter's work embodies the marriage of superb craftsmanship to the tragic sense of reality, which is the formula of true poetry."

-Joseph Brodsky

"Mary Jo Salter stands out for her intellect and expert craft."

-May Swenson

Henry Purcell in Japan (1985)

"Mary Jo Salter's first book is a cheering event, bringing us as it does a poetry full of alertness, tact, credible feeling, and an unforced gaiety of form. For all her modesty of tone, she has a range of awareness and response which, in a time when much poetry has shrunk to the merely personal, is refreshingly large."

-Richard Wilbur

"An inquiring mind, a sense of fun, and a sense of the past--of its claims and ambiguities--converge in this resonant and thrilling collection, by a winsomely gifted poet."

-Amy Clampitt

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