In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter
  • Jay Rogoff (bio)
Mary Jo Salter, Nothing by Design (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), viii + 113 pp.

Mary Jo Salter toys with us by calling her new book of poems Nothing by Design, since for almost thirty years she has graced us with exquisitely designed poetry. Do these new poems unfold in a random universe, where only individual interpretation bestows meaning upon our lives? Or in a world carefully and deliberately devised to reveal what Wallace Stevens called “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”? Salter’s previous collection of entirely new work, Open Shutters, played with the first [End Page 280] possibility. In its best poem, “Another Session,” the speaker tries ten permutations of the sonnet form in a futile attempt to explain the sudden accidental death of her psychotherapist; in another, “After September,” families can confront the World Trade Center attack only by asserting meaning in daily life: the equally “synchronized operations” of “putting the children to bed; / laying out clean clothes; / checking that the clock radio / is set for six o’clock tomorrow, / to alarm ourselves with news.”

Nothing by Design veers towards the second interpretation, as in Donne’s great oblique elegy for his wife, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” where love has “ruin’d me, and I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.” Deaths haunt the book, evoked in elegies for friends—a fellow mother, an architect, a mother-in-law—and eulogies for poets Amy Clampitt and Joseph Brodsky, as well as in “The Afterlife,” a meditation on Egyptian funerary art. (The long tributes to Clampitt and Brodsky run peculiarly parallel: both involve the speaker reading and pondering the poets’ unpublished notebooks, both, with trips to Bellagio and St. Petersburg, smack a bit too much of literary privilege, and both feel baggy.) But Salter’s great subject here is not so much death, but abandonment and bereavement, the nothing created by death’s designs upon us, but also by the scars inflicted by all those who leave. The book climaxes with a marital breakup, highlighted in “Bed of Letters,” a section of five poems. “String of Pearls,” the opener, starts with a cruel darkening of its initial nostalgic glow:

The pearls my mother gave me as a bride rotted inside. Well, not the pearls, but the string.— One day I was putting them on, about thirty years on, and they rattled onto the floor, one by one . . . I’m still not sure I found them all.

Browning fans will feel a chill at the peculiar opening couplet, a pentameter and a dimeter, the form of “Love Among the Ruins”; we have entered a waste landscape, where beauty and security dwindle invisibly into decay. As the speaker, “thirty years on,” laments that “A female’s born with all her eggs, / unfolds her legs, // then does her dance, is lovely, is the past,” she ponders her future “chances for love.” Her final line, far from Browning’s “Love is best,” wonders, in solitude, “But am I done?”

The divorce poems bristle with brilliance. “The Gazebo” contains an astonishing half-recognition on the speaker’s “last day at the house” that she barely can articulate even to herself: “I’m not aware I want to crush anything.” “We’re the luckiest couple you’ve ever met,” she recalls boasting, before the poem descends into melodrama: “the dripping now / is the sound of melting icicles / sharpening into knives.” A “Drinking Song,” [End Page 281] ironically modeled on Cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” marks the section’s weak point, but the wittily acid villanelle “Complaint for Absolute Divorce” inverts and subverts the couple’s marriage vows—“the universe as is: for worse, / for better”—before the poem “Bed of Letters” ends the set in a wistful, elegiac mood: “long / ago, two lovers dozed / naked and enclosed // one history between covers. / We woke and, shy and proud, / read our new poems aloud.” Suddenly we hear the title’s pun on “Bed of Lettuce” and understand how the salad days of these eager young poets have wilted.

In most...

pdf

Share